Focus on big polluters

Efforts to clean the air have been largely misdirected

Even an abundance of initiatives undertaken to restrain the stubbornly high pollution in the National Capital Region (NCR) has failed to produce the desired outcomes. Reason: The initiatives are largely misdirected. The relatively minor contributors to this menace have received the bulk of the attention even as some of the main culprits remain unaddressed. For instance, a lot of blame is ascribed to the burning of paddy stubble in the surrounding states even though it only adds to the locally generated pollution and that, too, for a short period of around a month (mid-October to mid-November). But pollution remains high,