In the News
November 9, 2021
Towards the end of the year, the season changes in northern India. Cold weather begins to set in and the air gets thick with smoke. After their winter harvest, millions of farmers clear the leftover rice stubble by setting entire fields alight to prepare for the incoming wheat crop.
The burning stubble generates copious amounts of smoke across the states of Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and the Indian capital of New Delhi.
Multiple attempts by the government each year to reduce stubble burning by providing alternate solutions to the farmers have largely failed.
Vidyut Mohan, a 30-year-old entrepreneur, may have a solution that would help reduce some of the air pollution and generate revenue for locals. Mohan’s company, Takachar, has developed technology that converts waste biomass into fertilizer.
Takachar has finetuned a machine that can be loaded into the back of a small truck or hitched to a tractor and taken across acres of farmland. The crop waste is fed into the machine and roasted in a controlled way that eliminates polluting particulate matter and carbon dioxide emissions, explained Mohan.”As compared to open burning of agricultural waste, our equipment prevents up to 98% of smoke emissions,” said Mohan.
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This past decade, India has been struggling to meet the emergent challenges presented by climate change as well as meet the increasing demands of a developing economy.
During the COP26 climate talks, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi pledged the country will achieve net zero emissions by 2070, which is decades after many other polluter economies.
India has the highest levels of air pollution globally, and its residents would live an average of 5.9 years longer if the country reduced pollution to within World Health Organization guidelines, according to the Air Quality Life Index (AQLI), published in an annual report by the Energy Policy Institute at the University of Chicago (EPIC).
The report found that all of India’s 1.3 billion residents face annual average pollution levels that exceed guidelines set by the World Health Organization.