November 24, 2015
By M Rajshekhar

The fog underscored just how poorly India's pollution problem is understood. (click here)

Why do farmers burn their fields in Punjab despite knowing that it worsens the fog over North India? Profitability of Punjab agriculture has fallen. The farmers know about the pollution caused, but do they have an option? Read more on Scroll.in. Photo by M Rajshekhar

On the evening of 7 November, a deep fog settled along the stretch of 250 kilometres between Sirsa and Gurgaon in Haryana. By ten in the night, it was thick enough to make travel almost impossible. In places, visibility shrank to not more than five metres. State transport buses cut their trips short. Cars, trucks and buses which kept moving towards Delhi did so cautiously, taking as long as six hours to cover a distance of 150 kilometres.

That night, the consensus among drivers and locals was that the fog was not natural but man-made. Not only does this part of India have several industrial units and power plants, in the months of October and November, farmers in Punjab burn fields to clear the crop stubble left after their kharif harvest. A sudden nip in the air that evening appeared to have trapped the emissions from both industry and burning fields close to the earth.

The fog underscored just how poorly India's pollution problem is understood. While the worsening of Delhi's air during the winter gets some attention, there is barely any acknowledgement that the blanket of chemical soup extends all the way till Punjab, and perhaps to the south of Delhi too.

There is also little understanding of what's needed to tackle the problem.

In the run up to the winter, Delhi chief minister Arvind Kejriwal asked Punjab government to ensure farmers did not burn their fields. A better alternative, he said, would be to plough the stalks back into the earth where they can decompose into humus.

But on the ground, things aren't as simple....