 Hello and welcome to News Click. The pollution over Delhi and neighbouring areas has gone down a little bit but so too has most of public interest and as a result policy makers are also asleep once again. To discuss this issue News Click is fortunate to have with us today Dr. Sharad Guttikunda, one of the foremost experts on air pollution in the country. Welcome Sharad. Thank you Raghu. Let me begin by asking you when the air pollution over Delhi was at its peak about a month ago the media was full of all kinds of information particularly the print media. What I wanted to do today was first to cut through the chatter and ask you what are the main sources of pollution in Delhi around which policies can be framed to control it. So it is air pollution is a complex issue and there is no one straightforward answer. But when it comes to sources of air pollution that is a very straightforward answer we know where the pollution comes from. So if we go by a basic baseline your main sources are your vehicles both your passenger transport and freight transport the road the dusty suspension that happens because of these vehicles on the road construction activities waste burning so even though it is officially banned we have a lot of waste burning that happens pretty much everywhere. So in response to the set of pollutants what would be the major measures you think are required to tackle these. So I think tackling pollution we can't just finger point one sector all of these sectors need to be at the same level. So we can start with a sector that we always talk of transport sector when we are looking at a big chunk of passenger transport demand happening in the national capital region of Delhi. So the country wise if we have close to 10% of the registered vehicles passenger vehicles are in the NCR region. Puts a lot of pressure on that. So we need a cleaner fuel for that. So we do have the auto fuel policy which is supposed to come into effect by 2020 and pushing your bar at 6 fuel. And there is no reason why that cannot be pushed further advanced basically for 2017 or 2018 so you have a big drop in the emissions from that. So within the transport sector you have to also worry about not just the fuel but also number of vehicles and usage. So it is hard to put a cap on the number of vehicles which are on the road when we can't tell people don't buy a car or don't bring out a car but I think program should be in place to cut the usage of these vehicles like give incentives for them to not bring out their car or not bring out their motorcycle by aggressively promoting the public transportation. So you need at least 20,000 buses to have a good clean reliable safe public transportation system where you actually have a significant change from buses and cars to public transportation system that's on the transport side. We need again we have program emission standards in place for power plants and industries for better regulations which are supposed to come into effect by December 2017 2017. So even that we should make sure that that happens and that it doesn't get delayed okay. It's the same thing with the garbage burning as well. The one sector which actually belongs to the municipal corporation that's right okay it's completely under their control they can't point fingers at the center saying they're not giving us permission or they're not allowing us to do this this is cities under cities ordinance so they should have better management programs for waste and same thing with the construction sector as well. Just coming back in second to the transport most of the attention has been focused on particulate matter true but we also know that there's a fair amount of nitrogen oxides which are major pollutants particularly from diesel vehicles yes what do you think can be done about that two things either we get rid of or rather reduce the usage of diesel in the city or we have a faster injection of cleaner diesel into the city so that's the major shift that has to happen that's right as well as vehicular fitments etc to reduce NOx emissions reduce NOx emissions basically yeah. So with the violet 6 almost every vehicle will have to come with an SCR that's selective catalytic converters and that will significantly drop your NO2 emissions that's right so because while we are on the topic in Delhi in the past ozone was never a issue that's right but now it's become a major issue because because your NOx emissions are going up and your volatile organic compound emissions are also going up primarily from the transport sector and that is basically compounding itself with the weather and you have ozone so if you look at 10 years ago we never bothered about ozone but I think now we have to start worrying about that as well and what about construction sector what kind of measures can be taken on that it's also very it's a tricky sector so main thing is that the coverage of the construction sites have to be there when the debris is being transported from the construction sites to the landfills the vehicles are supposed to be covered so that the debris doesn't fly off and they're also supposed to be vetted so that you don't have some research going on but we often see that on the roads especially at night trucks going at really high speed not covered and this debris is basically falling on the roads right so in the morning you have more vehicles on the road you have more dusty suspensions that's happening it is a bit of a vicious cycle so let me ask apart from construction dust is there a some estimation of ambient dust which as we know in Delhi tends to be fairly high because of its proximity to the deserts and to dry regions around the city as well as a fair amount of dust emanating from within Delhi itself because of unpaved surfaces on the sides of roads there is but it's not a straightforward calculation so for at least the dust which is on the roads we know how many vehicles are moving or the usage and you can account for a resuspension factor and say okay this much dust is coming off for the dust events dust storms that are coming from the west this is something which is linked to the meteorological parameters right and it keeps fluctuating in a in months like april and may we've seen at least this year very high number of dust events coming and some days it was almost close to 40-50 percent of the dust coming from the west right so as of even today the winds have actually picked up from the west which is why we have much less pollution in the last couple of days but it also is bringing a lot of dust from the west and in the models that we are running at least for today we are assuming we are accounting for about 15 to 20 percent of the pm 2.5 is actually your dust coming from outside of the region outside the region but with all the variations apart one can safely say that a fair amount of these particles come over deli this is I think fairly clear even from satellite maps is that right true compared to 10 not forget 10 they compared to two years ago the kind of satellite fields we have access to can really tell us how much area is under fire where is it under fire and when is it under fire and we are able to actually use that information we know the land use of those areas is that agricultural land is a forest land or an urban land and where the fires are being detected and we can use that information to assess not only the emission intensity of those fires combine that with the meteorology we know where it will move and how far and we are able to detect that we do have a good amount of data feeds coming in and we are able to assess it so which also means that we can actually see the impact of these fires within 12 hours of this detection that's right and we can actually take measures in advance knowing what's been happening for the last 10 years the minister for environment the union minister made a statement in parliament just a few days ago in response to a question about this and it occurred to me that this was a slightly disingenuous answer when he seemed to suggest that there is no very definitive data that shows that agri residue burning in Punjab or Haryana impacts on Delhi. Contrary to that I think we have enough information to say I would have thought so to ascertain when we are still modeling obviously we're not measuring but I think we have enough information from the meteorological departments and from satellite feeds to come up with a not with an exact number at least a range of how much pollution is coming from those fires. We may argue about whether it's 15% or 25% but it's a substantial amount and we know that and it's going to happen every year unless something is done about exactly I mean we've been seeing that for last 50 years when it's more intense in the last few years that's right it's going to happen in your mind what kind of institutional arrangements would be required to be able to control this because clearly this is not a single agency job no it will require multiple agencies to coordinate and work together. So how is that likely to be and can you throw some light on this from experiences we know from other countries or regions of the world? Well centrally speaking I mean we do have the central pollution control board which actually has the mandate both to monitor the pollution levels and also have the mandate to propose scenarios or propose action plan that other departments can follow. I think when we are talking from a managerial perspective I think central pollution control board is obviously like rightly placed to take the lead but it still has to coordinate with many different organizations. So having said that I think we need a group which actually has has a power to impose or to more authoritatively say that okay tomorrow's pollution I mean it doesn't have to be literally tomorrow but next month or next year's pollution is going to be so much we know it and this is going to happen so we need to target sector X sector Y and sector Z and we need actions from these sectors so that kind of planning has to happen like from the beginning when there has to be a long view on how do we address this air pollution and that's not going to happen with a with one group which is which primarily focuses on only monitoring. So it has to be I think a central group maybe it already exists I don't know or it can be formed with probably players from all these stakeholders coming together and put a plan forward. The reason I asked this is not only with reference to the pollution problem in Delhi absolutely but we know that the problem that we are experiencing in Delhi is also being felt in other cities across the country and we need mechanisms to be able to deal with it. The low inversions that we saw last week in Delhi it actually has been pushed and we are looking at some of the monitoring data coming from Kolkata and Patna areas their pollution is right now today three times worse than Delhi because everything is getting moved there and then getting suppressed there. So the phenomenon that we are seeing in Delhi is not very unique it is just that very high presence of media more number of institutions researchers scientists I think they're all sitting in Delhi studying in Delhi and then studying Delhi a lot more hence the focus is more on Delhi but the problem is definitely not restricted to Delhi. The common air pollution sources that we have discussing for Delhi also exist in pretty much all the cities you need cleaner fuel for all the cities you need better implementation of full emission standards for industries and power plants in all the cities your domestic cooking and heating problems exist in other places as well as I said more public transport more public transportation when it's a key thing and waste burning let's not forget that absolutely thank you very much Sharath