A Revolutionary step towards stubble burning…..
Whenever the winter season strikes every year, the detrimental issue of stubble-burning knocks the door in the parts of Punjab, Chandigarh, Delhi and other neighbouring states.
In 2019, according to satellite data there were 61,332 instances of stubble-burning in Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh between October and November. There were 75,532 instances in 2018, 88,948 in 2017 and a vast figure in 2016 as sourced from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research.
But further, going deep down in the topic let’s understand what actually is stubble-burning ?
Summarising it in a few lines, it is deliberately setting fire to the straw stubble that remains after grains like paddy, wheat etc., have been harvested so as to sow the next set of crops.
It emits a large number of toxic pollutants including Methane, Carbon Monoxide and various detrimental hydrocarbons. Burning husk on the ground leads to soil pollution and the excessive heat produced due to burning leads to loss of moisture and useful microbes.
But this time the government of Delhi has come up with a revolutionary idea so as to reduce the action or practise of this crop burning in Delhi.
Chief Minister on 30 Sep., Wednesday announced
that this time Delhi government would start the process of preparing a special fermented liquid solution so that it can be sprayed on over 800 hectares of land in the city where the practice of stubble burning is followed.
The process will be guided by the Pusa Research Institute and the expected cost is about less than 20 Lakh. The institute has come up with a very cheap solution by formulating the four capsules that can be mixed with a liquid solution prepared by jaggery and gram flour and can be sprayed to cover one hectare of land. The mixture softens hard straw and turns it into manure.
He further said that as there is no time left for the government to have distributed capsules to farmers and training them about the process, the government had decided to prepare the mixture and follow the process free of cost to the farmers.
Really, this could be an atrocious and a revolutionary step towards an intricate problem of crop burning. The results will soon be disclosed and then the practice can be applied to other regions as well, though there are many more reasons for Delhi’s poor and devastating quality of air and there is a frequent need of finding solutions for that, this new step is a hope for many more stupendous efforts and solutions to come which will eventually help to eradicate the various ecological problems.