Though dark smog returned to the National Capital Region on Thursday morning after a brief respite on Wednesday, the air quality improved somewhat by the evening.
It dropped from “very poor” to “poor” by Thursday afternoon. The credit for this went to the smog fighting measures including water spraying by fire engines.
Sprinklers were used to put down the hazy dust in many parts of the city, including the area around the Delhi Development Authority's high rise building on Ring Road.
On a day when the Delhi unit of the BJP, led by its president Manoj Tewari, marched to Lt Gov Anil Baijal's office to complain against the state government for “doing nothing” about the air pollution, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal told the National Green Tribunal that particulate matter levels had dropped on account of the water sprinkling in many parts of the capital.
The Environment Pollution Control Authority decided to lift the ban on entry of trucks into the capital as well as the ban on construction, given the improvement in air quality. With these bans not showing the desired results, the Delhi government continued to point an accusing finger at Punjab, where farmers admitted to burning stubble in order to cut down the time delay in planting next crop.
Petroleum and Natural Gas Ministry has decided to expedite the introduction of BS-VI grade automobile fuel by two years. It will now be used in India by April 2019—at least in the National Capital Region.
The Bharat Stage emission standards regulate the permissible toxic particles. But the System of Air Quality and Weather Forecasting and Research (SAFAR), the central government's air quality monitoring agency, attributed the smog to a dust storm in West Asia.
This had a sprinkler effect on the political storm raging between Punjab government on the one hand, and the Delhi government on the other, over the issue of stubble burning in the agrarian state.
Another twist to the smoggy tale was the Central Pollution Control Board's finding that the smog this year was worse than in the previous winters, largely on account of low wind speeds, which left pollutants literally hanging in the air.
