Its being called apocalyptic suffering unprecedented levels of pollution with warnings of consequences for Peoples Health but what exactly is causing pollution across the region. This is inside story. And i want to come to the program. Quality index is considered very. Hazardous. People. It is bad every winter but this is the 1st time the government has declared a Public Health emergency. 3 says he doesnt like driving his food but its necessary. The reason im wearing a mask has increased pollution i dont have any illness but i cough. In the last 45 days my nose is watering my eyes are burning. Children. She saw. On the pollution has forced her to go to hospital and. I have a cold a cough and my chest hurts since Pollution Increased everything hurts now. Doctors say because of the toxic small they have treated 5 times the usual number of patients over the past few days some People Living in Indias National capital say its become a gas chamber the State Government is alternating the days pass can be driven on the roads between those whose registrations and in history and those with evil but. Behind me is the iconic roster but the poverty or president s house its a Tall Building but today one can barely see it the government has taken the step to have the number of possible recalls on the street that should reduce air pollution a little but as long as farmers keep burning stumble in neighboring states yeah pollution is expected to continue to be very severe in new delhi. The spammers in the adjoining states of punjab and haryana have harvested their rice and now need to clear their land for their winter wheat crop burning is the quickest way environmentalists say that needs to change but i think at the end of the day farmers need to sort of put pressure on the government to ultimately provide bright markets that are needed to shift away to other crops but pharmacy if they are to change their practices and invest in clean up technology and machinery they need support from the government thats on top of it tackling other sources of pollution meaning those hoping for cleaner air are unlikely to have immediate relief. Aljazeera new delhi. Well joining me now are guests in new delhi kartika nessun a Research Fellow at the council of the Global Environment center hes a specialist on fire and haze prevention thats a problem that malaysia faces every year a warm welcome to you wolf cuts a guinness in the new delhi let me start with you if i may because thats the ground 0 of this problem i mean the air quality in new delhi is now being described as apocalyptic i mean why has the situation become so dangerous and how big is the scale of the problem briefly. So the good part is weve actually gone past apocalypse and its actually improved in some sense today and thanks largely to the fact that the meteorology is sort of played in favor of me and if you if you look at the situation thats currently there its there for going to reasons one is that i think the meteorology over the last 2 or 3 days has been really unfavorable that is like a big part of it but more importantly i think we anticipated that you know the emissions that actually. Were due troubling right now would not reach the proportions that they have and the fact that you know it would not combine so neatly with the meteorology and unfortunately that activity in the streets of delhi goes on as it would other ways and people dont really have a sense of the fact that you know it is really lethal to be the ed and thats the tribes most tragic but really so a lack of preparedness even though sort of ordinary when was declared even a month ago with regard to sort of emissions from other sources open with burning or even if its sort of ensuring that all the vehicles that are playing on the road have the emissions certificates in place or regulating in bend on the weather or what we can depend on is that every winter india gets this weather where you have a low moving air mas moving across the north india in collecting pollution from industries. Power plants households burning and there will be hazardous small unless you address those emissions if you look at the challenges that the Indian Government has had in implementing its policies one of their most depressing examples is the regulation open missions from bar plants that were supposed to already comply with new emission standards before this winter but the government and apart from south been dragging their feet and also diluting some of the standards the reason that i bring this up is that with our plants youre dealing with a few dozen sources whereas with farmers or households youre dealing with millions so this is should he want to be the easiest of places to start but there are all of course tradeoffs and there is opposition from those people who have to foot the bill for these measures paris there in bangkok 511. 00 how critical is the issue of vehicle emissions here because india may not have the strict vehicle emissions standards we see in north america and europe said you think car rationing will solve the problem i mean were talking about new delhi having Something Like 10000000 cars i mean thats very hard to police isnt it its difficult and thats why i think the government is looking up this alternate days changing trying to reduce the numbers but it is a challenge and its difficult to police that in such a dense city is new delhi. A car to going to send back there in new delhi i mean how much do you think indias rapid Economic Growth under Prime MinisterNarendra Modi may have been a contributing factor to this pollution crisis out and is the Environmental Impact an inevitable consequence of Economic Growth in trying to pull millions of people out of poverty. I think thats a good question of course it is undeniable that delhi sits in a place which is susceptible to air pollution in the winters every year but as you rightly said in the last decade or so the issues of course become very prominent delhi was one of the 1st cities in the country to espouse a compressed natural gas c. M. G. For its anti a fleet of public vehicles and a large share of our taxes in order to close the light here and that was to address the pollution that you know it was seen from take a look lucian back in the ninetys in the late ninetys and they have been degraded over time and he said that allowed for more dust to sort of really come in from the desert that delhi sits right next to us and that is really added to the problem now i dont think its a i dont think its correct to attribute this to the last 5 years of this of the of the government thats going to clean place its something thats accumulated over time. But the fact that you know different administrations sit at the center of the state and at the you know at the city level does not really help either because then theyre sort of its a bit of political jugglery where each party is blaming the other for inaction and every time something goes well at the state or take credit when in reality i think the meteorology is probably the one thing thats worked in favor of of clearing the at all lets little rock i think its really a combination of the fact that theres not been a clear political muster lets bring it back laurie melody jeffrey can i mean laura you extensively researched chinas coal consumption and Carbon Dioxide trends are there any similarities between the causes and effects of air pollution in india and china and why the situation has become so dangerous in new delhi. India seen rapidly rising coal consumption and old Oil Consumption in the last decade very similar to that gets offset by the rapid increase in oil costs coal consumption and Oil Consumption what china has managed to do in the last 5 years hes bringing down the levels of pollution significantly and that happened by putting a stop to the increasing coal consumption and then actually even dramatic improvements in that pollution control technologies that are used in coal fired power plants and factories and so on but it will be very hard to do this ok the technology on the other 10 percent a year of 5 percent per year increase in india underlying use of dirty energy will perish in bangkok i mean were being told that one major causing the pollution in new delhi is farmers in neighboring states like putting job in a hurry on a burning crop stubble to clear their fields i understand youre an expert in this sort of thing how big an issue is crop burning and how do you then deal with farmers whose crops up pretty much their livelihood. So we have a lot of experience in Southeast Asia with this in fact the burning of agriculture land for preparation of Agricultural Land is one of the main sources of the large scale transponder haze we have in Southeast Asia that affects more than 6 or 7 countries and sometimes the smoke cloud cover some of the development in these areas working with a farm a small holders Large Scale Companies private sector to introduce best management practice 0 burning practice has been practiced for the last 1520 years by large scale plantations and governments are really working to bring that down through initiatives and incentives to small holders by giving incentives all financial and other incentives for 5 days 3 villages that they call let me just take the take the debate back to laurie millipedes in helsinki because kartik in new delhi was talking about the Government Initiative of car rationing and driving cars with odd and even played some different days in other countries like mexico have used similar car rusting schemes and we know that china brought in a scheme for the olympics back in 2008 to reduce pollution in beijing and apparently they have the best equity in a decade what lessons do you think india can learn then from china success at improving at quality in that sense the measures taken into capital such as new delhi and beijing are things that gets the most attention but what china has really done well is addressing pollution from the entire region surrounding beijing. Up to hundreds of kilometers away beijing is surrounded by hundreds of plants its the region in the world that produces the most steel so that dressing that industrial sector has been by far the biggest challenge and of course addressing coal fired power plants new delhi is in are very telling position because its a city surrounded by areas with with tens of millions of people with factory. Yes with kwame households all of those emissions and its very limited the city is very limited in what what it can do within its own boundaries. And in no way talking about new delhi small or delis mold is a misnomer because were talking about a small that extends hundreds of kilometers all the way from one job to west bengal and what we really need to see in india is action on that regional level not just putting delhi alone on the spot because its impossible for the city to solve this alone most of the pollution there is coming from outside the city all right gentlemen stay with us if you will because i want to broaden this out across the region 99 their pollution reached alarming levels in Southeast Asia where toxic haze blanketed large parts of malaysia and singapore farmers in indonesia were blamed again for burning stubble to make way for new crops and the World Health Organization estimates around 7000000. 00 people who die each year from breathing polluted it more than 90 percent in low and middle Income Countries mainly in asia and in africa lets just bring back our guests here a concert going to them in new delhi so i mean these figures. I watering up they you know the World Health Organization estimates 7000000. 00 people die a year from breathing toxic 90 percent of those deaths in poverty stricken areas of asia of africa why is asia as a region blighted so much by this quickly. I think the even though the facts may suggest that 7000000 people a day across the world and in fact 1100000 of those in india if you walk down the streets of delhi or you know which is the most impacted you will not find too many people actually aware of this you will find that most people walk around without a mask so were not yet there were beijing got to when it came to you know Peoples Awareness and everybody Wearing Masks and Walking Around and sort of you know putting the government under siege when it comes to acting on this in improving the quality of laves so that realisation has not dawned on them and i think that is the most fundamental part of being able to address this issue because that has to be a public demand and an outcry saying that i want better quality and thats just not happened because there are a host of issues that governments need to resolve and we focus on infrastructure creation and jobs and Economic Growth but on the way and weve just basically let this by the wayside and i think thats really where the fundamental problem is and unlike the case of china and Southeast Asia where you know weve got these large sources that you know do the sort of relieving production in the case of delhi and much of india its a combination of sources that really result in what we have so delhi does not see the kind of germs that you know or jakarta would see but transport emissions arent doing that sort of that big its its a 4th of may be living under the 4th so i think thats also the big challenge that you know its really a multitude of sources which means that the responsibility of actually tackling air pollution is not just with one agency but its a multiple one spread across and in a democratic system when you have so many people coming together to work on air pollution its not that easy to dissolve but the it has to start with the public making a clear case for why they need to why air quality needs to be improved and that needs to figure out in the way they want to well come back to you in a 2nd just to respond to what kartik was saying there but let me bring it back fires will perish because youre an expert fires or fire and haze prevention yet every year in the nation of farmers a blame for causing this toxic haze that drifts across large parts of indonesia malaysia and singapore what do. Does this happen why cant these 3 governments prevent what is effectively an annual crisis i mean it has been going on in various scales for the last 2025 years the big problem that we have is that we have a special type of ecosystem called people an ecosystem a natural ecosystem which stores up to 10000 tons of carbon perfect lets just pick this up with laurie middle of the a lot of human use specialized on the impact of pollution across asia cannot be measured in health terms as well as the cost of the economy and absolutely we know from studies that have compared. The Life Expectancy the risk of many. Poor People Living in. Cities with clean air and those with polluted air that the risk of diseases like lung cancers troll. Heart attack and so on more goes up in polluted air in fact the entire global Life Expectancy shortened by about 11 months because of air pollution and of course a disproportionate part of that takes place in the most polluted places most of its which are in asia so it is a major Public Health issue and an economy issue im fine so let me ask you here because i mean just reading through some of these pollution reports they seem to be saying theres a clear link between such as like poverty blow income population growth that dictates toxic levels of air pollution so is this all about where you are on the economic scale that decides the quality of the air that you breathe. I mean its not just the way you are i mean its also where you are physically in relation to the high fire prone areas which in the region and in the prevalent wind direction where they are downstream of these a major fire prone areas its also driven a lot by also larger scale not just small scale burning but long. Scale burning related to fire spreading into plantation and forest land which the government is really struggling in this region the Southeast Asia to deal with and its a big issue across the indian subcontinent and this is where we need a much broader innovative approach to bring in new incentives to address and prevent large scale burning and give proper incentives for good Land Management practices and reward measures that which prevent the use of fire and encourage long term Crop Development without fire kartik going to sin in new delhi i mean its not just about vehicle emissions is a demand the World Health Organization says 3000000000 people thats 40 percent of the worlds population still dont have access to Clean Cooking fields and technologies and thats of course the main source of household pollution. Absolutely i mean thats thats a great point that you make and i think theres been a bunch of studies that have basically said that 30 percent of all ambient particulate matter pollution that comes out is actually coming from those burning biomass and that is you need something we can escape from but this gunman had done a fantastic job in india with the prison and he would you allow your journal where theyve basically gone ahead and given a free lp you connection for the people who cant afford it below the poverty line and for others you know i dont have any subsidized aid so sort of enticing them to war from the use of bio mass in cooking and moving to l. P. G. Which is liquid Petroleum Gas which is blocking then given to houses and diamonds that people need to sort of start seeing the value but at the end of the day to something its a commodity that theyre going to be paying something for firewood in many parts of the country still streets some people do spend on it but they dont quite realize that the tradeoff in terms of spending that money on l. P. G. Can have positive impacts for their health and at the end of the day can also end up saving them some money because you know theyre not following through ok often and the fact that you know the entire family is healthier so thats on the scene will have to happen slowly ok final parish in bangkok a final thought from you given the scale of indias air pollution can it be fixed or is it too little too late do you think definitely these things can be fixed but it needs political will and needs a broad based approach and it needs not just focusing on the vehicles in the city but in the large Scale Agricultural Development around giving real incentives to farmers for maybe changing crop type so changing approaches supporting mechanization and other incentives to reduce the this annual large scale burning which is actually not good not only for health but its bad for the Agricultural Land it decreases the productivity if you burn it better you keep the organic material and improve the productivity in situ laurie merely peter in helsinki can asian governments turn this around you think many other asian capitals is that when the middle class rose when the. People start to worry more about their Health Declines in a body or paulson goes up and the political pressure goes up i definitely expect to see governments across asia taking more action one thing to ask in group in india is the level of data and access to data so that we can know track progress and point out where progress is happening and where not and i believe that Data Available soon is also going to speed things up all right gentlemen its a fascinating debate but time is against us we have to leave it there thanks to all our guests concert going to happen in new delhi. In helsinki and final parish in bangkok thank you all and thank you too for watching you can see the program again any time by visiting our website aljazeera dot com and for further discussion go to a Facebook Page thats facebook dot com forward slash a j inside story and you can also join the conversation on twitter handle is a. J. Inside story for me daryn jordan and the whole team here goodbye from. 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