Delhi’s AQI: Solutions Exists, Need to be Implemented

Labelled the most polluted city in the world, Delhi, yet again, grapples with horrendous and deadly levels of AQI. This has become a seasonal staple in winters with little recourse in terms of immediate relief to residents or even long-term solutions towards a cleaner city. We speak with Ranbir Saran Das, Chairman & Managing Director, Fairwood Group, who has decades of industrial experience ranging from agri-business, new city development, social infrastructure, energy business and transportation. He shares with us a vision for a better planned Delhi with intelligent waste management, vertical movement and cleaner air.

Priyaanka: Let us start with the most immediate and pressing issue of Delhi’s AQI. What according to you are the lapses each year that result in Delhi facing this crisis, year on year, and what are the immediate efforts that can be taken to ease the severity and what are the long-term measures critical to act on?

Ranbir: AQI in Delhi gets very bad in this month and month and a half. And that is a particular reason and that has a particular solution. But Delhi has bad AQI for most of the year. Except during the monsoons. There are lots of other causes that cause a higher AQI. As far as the farmer and Punjab crop burning, it is really just a case of incentivizing the farmer with financial rewards of getting them to cut the waste and giving them to centers that would have briquetting machines to turn them into pellets. And then use that waste as an energy source to gasify it and create energy. It is worth paying them a lot more money. I think the solutions about trying to use chemicals to dissolve the stubble, I think that’s a long way off and requires a huge scale.

Priyaanka: Where do you think we’ve not succeeded in incentivizing them adequately yet?

Ranbir: It’s a policy issue. It could be a budget issue for Punjab, it could be a political issue. Or inter party rivalries between the states of origin and the states of destination of this cloud. The other point is the rice crop is harvested this time, a little before this, and they need to prepare the field for the next crop. But I think the cropping pattern people have spoken and said that this needs to be changed so that rice is grown less in Punjab and so on and so forth. This is a fair estimate decision which needs to be done.

Priyaanka: What are the other reasons for the typically elevated AQI year-round. What are the issues at stake? And what can we do to mitigate this?

Ranbir: So, number one, is the mountains of dumps that exist. Emissions from these two gigantic mountains actually are poisoning 3 or 4 million people around them and are degrading the real estate value and quality of life of these people. Second is the power plants, the coal-based power plants, which exist around Delhi. Here is a rather simple solution to just remove the particles from the emissions from these power plants, scrubbing the emissions. There are technologies that exist. I don’t know why this is not being done, but this is a fairly simple and a fast solution for that emission. Which increases the AQI as well. And then there are huge amounts of emissions, which comes from congested roads and vehicle traffic.

Priyaanka: Delhi faces a severe air quality crisis. Why have waste dumps and their toxic emissions remained a persistent issue despite interventions?

Ranbir: We have about 11,000 to 13,000 tonnes of garbage coming out of Delhi every day. I’m only talking about Delhi, not NCR. Because the problem is mainly of Delhi. And about 50 to 60% of this is processed into energy or into compost every day. So, there is an addition of that other 50% that are being added to these mountains every single day, which is not being processed. And this is fresh garbage that rots in a short period of time. And, methane is released in the air, and dust is released in the air. This is as I said, rapidly poisoning a couple of million people in Delhi.

Now, this is a problem that you cannot solve by these little band aid solutions because the problem is accelerating much faster than your solutions are being provided. And there are only these two main dumps, so they can keep on growing bigger and bigger and bigger unless you stop this practice of putting more garbage on these existing dumps. Now that’s easier said than done. So basically, what you need to do is yes, stop dumping on these two hills. Find another place, maybe 20, 30 acres or somewhere else. This can easily be done by a land audit of Delhi, there is a lot of wastefully utilized or unutilized land in Delhi. And start dumping the new garbage over there.

Priyaanka: So now there are two issues of what to do with the old hills. And then how to tackle the new area.

Ranbir: Now the old hills, you cannot shift out the garbage. But you need to make them benign so that they stop emitting dust and toxins. Now you can use a geo membrane. The geo membrane is a fabric which stops water from percolating through it; which stops any gases. So, cover the whole hills with geo membrane. This geo membrane is available, I don’t think in India, but it’s available elsewhere. And this has been done in Thailand, I believe, to a very successful extent. It has also been done in China. So, it is not a new technology.

But then what happens to the gases, the decomposition that happens in a landfill and therefore leads to methane emissions. Now, methane is not a danger, it is a valuable asset. I say that waste is not waste until it is wasted. Now, so you insert a pipeline network under the fabric, that takes the methane out. A lot of the old legacy waste methane is already gone. Because methane develops only for a short period of time, but all the new garbage being dumped is going to still emit this. So, you extract the methane out and use the methane for energy. It becomes a valuable asset. And then on top of that, once you’ve extracted all the methane and the geo fabric is over there, then you cover it with soil and it becomes a hill station. And you can even build real estate on that. And Delhi has two mountains then!

Priyaanka: At the moment, none of this is being done? Are we not repurposing the methane?

Ranbir: No. The government has spoken about using methane, but it’s just an overwhelming task if you keep on dumping on the same thing. And the other thing I should mention is that waste should not be segregated. They’re talking about composting waste. And therefore, it requires manual segregation. And that requires a lot of people who are at risk. And it requires a lot of land waste to go into the dump unsegregated, which makes the process much faster and much more easily manageable.

Priyaanka: For the new sites how do we begin in the best way using this knowledge?

Ranbir: Now, when you have the new site, which is called a sanitary landfill. Which means that you on the ground first lay the geo fabric so that there’s nothing seeping into the soil. And then you keep on dumping into that at a base that you can start processing on that site or around that site.

Now do not go in for incineration. That itself causes a lot of dust and particles. Which is very old technology. There is a very simple technology called plasma gasification. Just dump the unsorted waste into these gasifiers. This exists all over the world, in Korea, in Canada, all over the world. I have designed and built one in Gift City. I designed Gift City, by the way. In Gift City, all the waste is evacuated through underground tunnels by vacuum and it goes into a plasma gasifier and is destroyed.

But here in Delhi, of course, you’ll have to move the waste by trucks. And the only residue depends on the caloric value of the waste, but with our increase of more and more plastics and more paper and et cetera, et cetera, the calorific value is also increasing day by day. Depending on the caloric value, you might be able to generate quite a lot of electricity out of that. And the only residue that comes out is small pellets, which are absolutely benign. You can put these pellets in your drains, you can even put them in your mouth. And these are used for making tiles or road surfaces or construction. So waste is put to use. And it’ll be much easier to deal with a new landfill and put all your processing facilities over there.

Priyaanka: All this will require time and effort?

Ranbir: Sure, this is not done overnight. This will be a three-year programme at least. But I assume that this is a fairly low-cost option. It could easily be done with much less than a thousand crores for all of Delhi.

I was a member of the executive council of Green Growth Leaders in Copenhagen in 2007-2010 and one of the very famous architects Bjarke Ingels, he created a mountain resort in Copenhagen which is a flat country and from the waste dump, he created a ski resort and a very high end residential and commercial buildings on top of the waste dump. It’s a beautiful project.

Priyaanka: Traffic congestion and emissions contribute significantly to Delhi’s pollution. You mentioned schemes like odd-even cars are only a band aid. What would be more long-term solutions?

Ranbir: It’s impossible to provide adequate public transit in adequate numbers to affect a modal shift from private to public transit. Delhi is an old city, there is no road space available to put in, say, thousands of buses on already choked Delhi roads. Even then the shift will be insufficient. There’s a saying – “Too far to walk. Too close to drive”.

So this is why most people use their cars. And your car is typically used for 5% of its time, out of which as for some study, 2% of the time is spent trying to find a parking space. So, it is a wasted asset.

You need to have public transit stops or stations, like bus stops or metro stations or any other stations. You must have a station within a walking distance. So, between 10 to 15 minutes walking. That’s a huge network that you need to create. Otherwise, the incentive to use public transport will just not exist. The population of Delhi is increasing so fast. Delhi Metro is doing an amazing job. It is one of the largest networks of metros in the world. But still the share of private mobility is increasing much faster, increasing congestion, emissions and accidents. We kill in India much more than one and a half lakh people every year and out of that, every year 17,000 are kids. So, this is very, very urgent.

Priyaanka: We must have targets and ambitions. What are your targets?

Ranbir: So, my first target would be anywhere to anywhere X minutes. The X you can fix. For example, you can say anywhere to anywhere in Delhi in an hour. That’s an ambition. And you then design the transportation accordingly. China did this effectively in another sphere, let’s say anywhere to anywhere in China in 8 hours. And China’s two and a half to three times bigger than India. They built expressways, they built the airports anywhere to anywhere in eight hours.

The other ambition should be zero conflict. Conflict on the surface, on the roads, causes accidents, causes deaths., And you have to increase walkability in the city. You have to create pedestrian only areas. You have to increase public spaces, park recreational places where there’s no traffic, no cars. And you have to have a minimal disruption to city life and to the urban fabric.

There’s only one way of doing it. And that is of a vertical integration of your infrastructure and your mobility; not crowd the ground which causes conflict. Now, Delhi Metro, for example, is doing that. It is elevated and it’s underground. But everything else is in conflict with people. And crowding the roads and crowding the city. So, your first step here, I would suggest, is to create a citywide elevated pedestrian network that connects all major transit stations or stops with travelators and climate control so that people who can’t walk for very long have the travelators in these walkways.

And provide clusters, say every 500 metres or small retail outlets where they can buy soft drinks or newspapers. These clusters will help finance the capital cost significantly. I suspect that this will not be a very expensive proposition for Delhi. It would take all the pedestrians off the streets. It would take a lot of the small retailers and hawkers off the streets as well. So, this vertical segregation would tremendously reduce traffic jams and therefore the emissions.


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