 This is Delhi on November 5th. The highest AQI of the day was recorded at 4.67. This is Delhi on November 16th. The highest AQI of the day was recorded at 4.30. There has been a long discussion going on for several years over the contributing factors of pollution in Delhi as per experts. However, this year the Centre for Environment and Science has come up with a report that studies the local sources of pollution and this might change the stakeholders of the debate on who is responsible for pollution in the national capital. As per the latest report of CSC, the biggest contributor in the rising pollution level of Delhi is vehicular emission. If you eliminate everything outside pollution but look only at the local sources, then vehicles have been dominating this entire period. This is Anumita Roy Chaudhary, Executive Director at the CSC. Newsclick spoke with her about the report and its findings. What we did, while we looked at the overalls, outside and inside, but we also wanted to know then what is Delhi's own problem. So we took out, excluded the outside and we took the inside Delhi and looked at those eight sources in Delhi. And when we compared that, that has shown that if you eliminate everything outside pollution but look only at the local sources, then vehicles have been dominating this entire period. If you look at what are the average, it's around half of the pollution of Delhi. So that is really worrying and then after vehicles then you have these other sources. One, that it's even showing that solid fuel use in households, that's one big contributor. Industries, they have continued to remain a problem. Then construction and waste burning and then comes whole range of other sources. This report does not absolve the adjacent nine districts of the national capital region along with biomass burning. These districts are somewhere equal participants in the increasing pollution level of Delhi. Because pollution does not follow administrative boundaries, it blows between boundaries. So if you look overall and we looked at that data, we looked at that hourly data that has continuously changed between October 24th and 8th of November. So this is the early winter phase and this is the time when the pollution, the first season's first mug also built up. So what is fascinating to see that during this period, one, that the contribution from outside Delhi has also been very big. There have been days when the contribution from the NCR region has been more than 60%. Now there has been a lot of clamour about Delhi government's much talked about major, the smog tower. The two smog towers have been installed at two places in Delhi, Karnat Place and Anand Vihar. Nowhere in the world we have seen an application of smog tower as a regulatory measure. People do this more as a recreational measure that they put them up in the parks and people just go and sit around it and you know, they just take the, you know, that's a kind of approach that you have. So where is, so now that we have got these purifiers, so the only question that we're asking, that where is also the impact assessment? That what is there to show that in Anand Vihar, if you have the smog tower, then what, how it has helped to improve the ambient air? That is the fundamental question because yes, if you put air through the purifier, what is going in is going to be dirty and what is coming out is going to get cleaned up. But that doesn't mean that you are cleaning up the ambient air of Delhi and that is the more important issue for us. So where is that impact assessment done to show and today Anand Vihar continues to remain among the top five most polluted locations in the city. The politics of Delhi's pollution doesn't only remain in Delhi, it affects the neighboring states as well. In this debate, the farmers of the two neighboring states, Haryana and Punjab, have become the punching bags. This report has definitely broken the lies served to citizens about stubble burning and its impact on Delhi's pollution. When we look at the biomass burning, the stubble burning, as we heard yesterday, what Supreme Court has said that, okay, there might be a contributor, but they are not a very big contributor to Delhi's pollution. That's something that we need to really understand. Yes, because it's only during the stubble burning period when the daily contribution increases. But even that is highly variable because that depends on the wind speed and direction. So if you look at this entire period of 1st October to 15th November this year, then on a daily basis the contribution from stubble burning has varied between 1-4% to 30% and more. But in most of the days it is actually on the lower side. But if you take the entire winter then maybe not more than 5-6% and also certainly not throughout the year. So stubble burning is only an episodic problem. Even now, when Delhi government has ordered to shut down all its coal power plants and construction, the situation outside Delhi has remained the same. In the NCR, the uses of coal and power plants are still running. As per experts, the NCR region has a total of 11 coal power plants, many of which do not meet the new emission standards. If we do not address all the sources with equally stringent action and with a very strong compliance strategy across the region, that is the big ticket agenda that we have to address now.