SubhanAllah!
Delhi is again a gas chamber!
In Delhi, you have now three vacations – Winter, Summer and Pollution vacations.
The pollution of fire crackers on Diwali along with stubble burning gets trapped in the atmosphere due to the onset of winters, resulting in the smog, and eventually a gas chamber.
Imagine! The scenario that AQI (Air Quality Index) from severe to poor is considered as an “improvement.”
What else to expect under Capitalism, where the metropolitan cities are getting concentrated as the facilities are not facilitated all over and is concentrated only in the big cities, thus making people immigrate there due to various pull and push factors like schools, colleges, jobs, hospitals etc. Capitalists benefit from it by having a pool of talents concentrated in such cites and raising the competition bar very high, with easy substitutes available on their set scales of desired salaries, resulting in more vertical heights of building constructions and more emissions from vehicles – Black Carbon!
The unchecked factories which are increasing day in day out because of consumerism with no check on their pollution emissions to high extent is alarming.
I remember that while we were doing our final year project in university, we made it on the Jindal Waste to Energy plant based in Okhla, Delhi, which was deteriorating the lives of the masses because of the toxic pollutants coming out from it, and it was literally located near a residential area. It was also affecting even the vicinity of Apollo hospital, Holy Family hospital, Lotus temple and other densely populated residential areas nearby.
But who will check all this?
Only some residential voices were doing the rounds, but no one from the authorities was doing what they were supposed to do, because they need these corporations to fund them during their election campaign, and this is just a small glimpse. How many such devastating factories are suffocating the air is beyond comprehension.
Stubble burning is always an issue at this time of the year, and it is something which can be solved by providing farmers the right technology.
As per the reports, “The Indian Agricultural Research Institute developed a microbe, Pusa, that hastens decomposition and converts stubble to compost within 25 days, improving soil quality as a result. A tractor-mounted extension machine called Happy Seeder sows wheat while simultaneously removing straw and depositing it over the sown land as mulch. These technologies, though impressive, have high operational costs.”
The system is supposed to provide such technological set ups along with the operational costs to the farmers at least at an affordable rate, but the system’s nucleus is selfish benefits, they will always keep the poor farmers on debt and even if they will provide such machineries, they will give it on high interest based loans which is again a vicious cycle for the poor farmers, and consequently the only feasible way left for them is then to burn the stubble, which leads to this pollution.
- Facilitating the facilities all over, and not confining it to some concentrated cities will also help. There should be a check on the factories as well, in fact the whole consumeristic/capitalist market should be put into their right place.
We used to metaphorically label Delhi as a place which is suffocating because of it being always in the news due to crimes like rape, but now it has officially become the place which is highly claustrophobic. The world air quality report, as per the state of global air (SoGA) has again qualified Delhi as the most polluted city of the world!
