Delhi’s flip-flop over an odd-even vehicle scheme to get the gasping city through its annual fortnight of peak air toxicity has given us flashes of clarity amid a policy haze. Severe air quality last week led the Delhi government to think of halving four-wheelers on the capital’s streets, despite past attempts offering little relief. When first mooted, this idea rested on a study that traced a sizeable share of the city’s foul air to vehicular exhaust. But this was a slice-up of annual data, while the worst phase is a different story, with a significant role played by farm fires elsewhere. Clarity came from the Supreme Court, which dismissed odd-even as “optics," while a pretext to defer the plan was supplied by light showers that rescued the capital from red-alert readings on the Air Quality Index, though only for a brief period before a Diwali-cracker spike in pollution blurred the scenario again. Delhi’s smog has always had many contributors, and the scope this creates for confusion makes it crucial that bad ideas like odd-even get called out. This is too serious a health hazard to trifle with.
Although mitigation efforts are directed at anthropological aspects of the crisis, meteorological patterns are a key part of what’s going on. As India’s northern plains cool in autumn, wind flows shift and Delhi gets a north-westerly draft; and as winter nears, cooler and denser air closer to the land’s surface gets trapped in stillness under a warmer layer, whose low pressure sucks in higher-level flows from surrounding areas. In Delhi’s case, aided by north-westerly winds, airflows come mostly from Haryana and Punjab. If these happen to be smoke-laden—as they have been for much of this century—the capital turns into a kind of gas chamber with no exit channels for bad air to disperse. Records show noxious inflows gaining frequency, even as the north’s isobar maps lose predictability. This brings us to the anthropogenic causes of Delhi’s seasonal suffocation. The post-harvest burning of rice stubble across a vast paddy zone to the city’s north-west is a direct cause, no doubt, but does climate change play a role too?
Cause-and-effect links haven’t proven conclusive. Yet, as the planet warms, a squeezed sowing window for the north’s wheat crop after its rice harvest has been a clear trend. In 2008, to prevent groundwater depletion, rice farmers were asked to use monsoon water for irrigation, but late rains have spelt paddy delays, pushing the crop cycle forth, even as studies have found wheat increasingly vulnerable to drops in yield if sown late. That winter rains are also more erratic adds to this anxiety. The hurry to clear fields leads some farmers to set paddy residue aflame (machines could do this but take fuel and more labour). On paper, an obvious solution is to nudge farms away from rice cultivation. This supply is not a response to market demand, after all, but to a government policy of procurement. Rife with input subsidies, this sector’s basic structural aim is to stuff central granaries, not go by market signals. Despite rising support prices for foodgrains like rice and wheat, both of which are dispensed free to the poor, farm incomes have been under such strain in recent years that farmers rejected the Centre’s 2020 reform proposals on the worry that they’d be left even worse off. So, in practice, getting farms off rice is a political hot potato. Yet, the annual chokehold that Delhi experiences must ease one way or another. Perhaps it’s time to place this challenge on our climate agenda. Let it be a test case of our resolve on eco-friendly living.
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