Kiln sweep at grave cost

There is exultation in Delhi ever since the World Health Organization (WHO) said in its recent report that Delhi was not the most polluted city in the world, just one of the 20 most polluted! According to the 2016 Global Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database, Zabol, located in the dustbowl of Iran, is the most polluted city in the world. 

Delhi has always received special attention to reduce pollution. Polluting industries were moved out to neighbouring Haryana. Vehicular pollution was sought to be controlled by introducing CNG (Compressed Natural Gas), considered a cleaner fuel than petrol and diesel. It’s quite another matter that neighbouring UP and Haryana continue to use petrol, diesel and whatever other fuel mixtures they want. The Supreme Court had ordered all diesel-run taxis off the road and Arvind Kejriwal’s odd-even transport policy is an attempt to clean up Delhi’s noxious air. Governmental and non-governmental agencies behave as though Delhi is India and if you clean up this filthy, contaminated city, you have cleaned up all of India. 

Another dirty air monster that has been tagged by Delhi is the emission from brick kilns. Reacting to pressure, the Uttar Pradesh government recently issued a diktat to all brick kiln owners in areas around Delhi to change their technology so that flue gases would not be as polluting. So, brick kiln owners in Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar and Hapur have been given 90 days to remodel their kilns so that the air in the National Capital Region is rendered purer. It’s quite alright however for the brick kilns in nearby Gajraula, Moradabad , Bareilly and Shahjahanpur to continue spewing toxins into the air. 

Brick kilns need to be controlled, mainly not to clean up Delhi’s air but to stop their assault on agricultural productivity and the country’s food security. Ghaziabad, Gautam Budh Nagar, Hapur, Gajraula, Moradabad, Bareilly, Shahjahanpur mentioned above and all the other cities in UP are sitting on the Indo-Gangetic Plains. This is the most fertile part of India, with rich alluvial soil. Alluvial soil of the river plains is made up of the sediments deposited by rivers. Because of their chemical composition and texture, they rank among the most fertile soils in the world. There is clean, sweet water here, just below the surface, and bumper yields are assured if you just take the trouble of planting seeds. 

This region is where food should be grown; it has fed India for millennia. This is also the region that along with Punjab and Haryana, serve as the nation’s food bowl. This is the region that produces grains that goes into our buffer stocks and makes available cereals for the government’s food-support initiatives like the public distribution system, the midday meal scheme in schools, the anganwadis under ICDS, the Annapurna and Antodaya schemes for the old and indigent. 

This is not where you should allow the rich, fertile top soil to be scraped off the earth and made into bricks. The layers below the top soil are not fertile and will not support bumper crops. Abundant water should not be used to mould bricks, but to grow food, to nourish the fields of rice, wheat, maize and barley, fields where vegetables, fruits, pulses and beans grow. The water here should support pastures where animals can graze and drink water and give good milk. 

I went home recently to Tilhar, which is in Uttar Pradesh’s Shahjahanpur district. In village after village, large shallow tanks could be seen where the soft, loamy soil was being puddled with water and kneaded into the dough that is formed into bricks, sun-dried and then baked in wood-fired kilns. Shoulder-high stacks of bricks were either drying in the sun before being fired in the kilns, or rows of ready baked bricks were stacked for transportation.

At every site, there was a tube well spewing out ground water to make the dough for the bricks. And everywhere there were piles of Eucalyptus wood to fire the kilns. 

Eucalyptus has been planted in many fields either as a border crop or as a plantation in the entire field. Eucalyptus is notorious for sucking up the groundwater and should be banned but farmers get more money from the sale of wood to the brick kilns than they do from the government to whom they sell their grains. So fertile fields end up growing wood for brick kilns instead of growing food. 

Here, in what was and should be the food bowl of the nation, lack of governance is enabling the destruction of rich, natural resources like soil and water. If the resources were used intelligently, farmers would grow crops aplenty, produce milk in abundance and they and the nation would eat well, the economy would look up and the country would prosper. Bricks can be made from fly ash and other waste materials. It is unnerving to witness brain-dead policy allowing the richest, most productive soil to be converted into bricks, turning lush, bountiful fields into barren lands, snatching away farmers’ livelihoods and depleting the nation’s food reserves. This must stop.  

The author is a scientist and development activist