Opinion From the Opinions Editor | On Diwali: A Hope and a Wish

An initiative by the country’s scientists and hawklike monitoring by the judiciary has raised hopes that pollution will not play a spoiler in the festive season in the coming years. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) has developed a rice variety that is as productive as the current one but matures faster. That should enable harvesting by early October, giving farmers enough time for field preparation to plant the next crop and obviate a major reason for stubble burning in Punjab – a major factor for the cocktail of toxins in the air over large parts of North India this season. As the editorial, ‘Laying parali to rest’ (IE, November 11) pointed out, “This should be accompanied by strict enforcement of the polluter pays principle”.

Moreover, as the editorial argued, “the free supply of electricity for irrigation must end. Having to pay for water will force Punjab farmers to reduce paddy acreage, which itself should address multiple problems – including that of air pollution”. This point was also underlined by agriculture economist Ashok Gulati in ‘The rice of the matter’ (IE, November 11). “Punjab farmers get a subsidy on paddy cultivation to the tune of almost Rs 30,000/ha, which comes through free power and highly subsidised urea and other chemical fertilisers. This subsidy constitutes roughly one-third of the profits in Punjab’s paddy cultivation; this is the root cause of farmers sticking to paddy even when they know they are damaging water aquifers. This is reinforced by the open-ended procurement of paddy by state agencies for the Food Corporation of India,” he wrote.

The endeavours to find alternatives have acquired desperately needed urgency because of the push by the Supreme Court. Last week, a two-judge bench told the Punjab government that “the fight against stubble burning cannot be political” and reminded it that the problem should be seen from the perspectives of public health, ecology and sustainable agriculture. The Court asked for an immediate dousing of the farm fires. But as the editorial, ‘Dousing the fires’ (IE, November 9) pointed out the apex court’s “directive to frame long-term solutions should not be lost on policymakers”. This would require, as the editorial pointed out, reaching out to farmers “on multiple fronts including running information drives and providing financial incentives. Farmers will not burn the crop residue if they are offered ways to derive profits from waste”.

The long overdue push to end the unsustainable practice should, of course, be accompanied by measures to eliminate other emissions that make the air acrid. Two articles in this newspaper’s Best of Both Sides series, ‘People must drive the change’ by Anumita Roychowdhury, and ‘Clean air needs incentives’ by Arunabha Ghosh (IE, November 10), directed attention to making the push to clean up the air more potent. Roychowdhury argued that “any scale of change will never be enough unless the demand for car usage is reduced with effective action”. That’s why she underlined “the political will to tame the car has to get stronger to ensure a substantial shift to public transport. It is possible. About 60 per cent of Delhi’s urban area will be within a 15-minute walking distance from metro stations and about 80 per cent of Delhi residents will be within 400 metres of some metro station once the entire network is in place. Scalable integrated public transport services, feeders, a dense street network for walking and cycling, and more housing closer to the transit nodes can make a difference”. Ghosh had a somewhat divergent view: Making clean air “an asset that can drive economic growth”. “The impacts are clear. The OECD estimates that approximately 1.2 billion workdays are lost globally each year due to air pollution, and this could reach 3.8 billion days by 2060. Studies have found that air pollution also impacts crop harvest, and corporate and foreign investment. But different stakeholders need to know why cleaning the air will benefit their livelihoods and businesses. For instance, farmers will not curb stubble burning until a viable circular economy for alternative uses of biomass emerges. Such interventions are also about creating new markets,” he pointed out.

It’s increasingly becoming clear that clean up must happen on several fronts, and things should not come to a pass when firefighting measures have to be pressed into service. As social scientist Rohit Negi pointed out in ‘The odd and even of Delhi’s air’ (IE, November 11), “While attention is understandably intense during the smog episodes and emergency measures are important, anti-pollution action must be perennial just like the problem”.

The issue, as Negi emphasised, requires “deft politics in the truest sense of the term”.

Here’s hoping that driven by the judiciary – and prodded by the public — the political class summons the resolve.

Let the values of Diwali matter, more not less.

Stay well,

Kaushik Das Gupta

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