Days after recording the best air quality at the end of November, Delhi has woken up yet again to a heavy cover of smog on Wednesday. In the Parliament on Tuesday, Environment Minister Anil Madhav Dave said that there is no conclusive study available that burning of paddy straw or crop residue in states like Punjab and Haryana impacts air quality in Delhi and Rajasthan.?
Addressing the Lok Sabha through a written reply, he said, "As per the Report of IIT Kanpur, the back trajectory analyses suggest that the crop residue burning and other biomass emissions may be transported to the national capital from the sources upwind of Delhi."
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The Minister also assured the Lok Sabha that to counter pollution in Delhi, burning of paddy stubble has been banned in its neighbouring states like Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan.
Adding that Delhi High Court has assigned the responsibility of prevention of stubble burning and biomass on the Chief Secretaries of the state governments, which have initiated steps for compliance, he said, "Available satellite images indicate that the enforcement of ban on paddy stubble burning in farmlands of Punjab, Haryana and parts of Uttar Pradesh has not been fully implemented and there has been significant level of stubble burning."?
"Government has been monitoring various preventive measures to curb the burning of paddy stubble/crops residue and check the pollution level in Delhi and NCR at regular intervals," Dave added.?
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In the first week of November this year, the capital¡¯s 24-hour average air pollution ¡ª 900micrograms per cubic meter of particulate matter finer than 2.5 micrometers ¡ª was 40 times higher than the World Health Organisation (WHO) guidelines (25ug/m3) and around 15 times higher than the Indian standards (60ug/m3).
The Supreme Court (SC) imposed a blanket ban on the sale and stocking of firecrackers in the National Capital Region.?
The Delhi government plans to set up 20 air pollution-monitoring stations that will measure only Particle Pollution (PM) 2.5 and 10. PM 2.5 and PM 10 are microscopic particles, many times smaller than the average width of a human hair, and can damage the respiratory system and enter the bloodstream causing further complications.
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A real-time air quality monitoring public service has also been launched on Twitter. You can use #Breathe followed by the area you live in to check the data. With #Breathe, people can monitor the air quality they breathe across 17 cities using 75 monitoring stations. Over the next year, the service will add 10 more cities.