A day after the Bharatiya Janata Party’s (BJP) Delhi unit president Adesh Gupta alleged that none of Delhi’s farmers had received the Pusa bio-decomposer by the Delhi government to convert stubble into manure, Delhi Environment Minister Gopal Rai on Wednesday slammed the BJP saying that the leaders of the saffron party is constantly telling lies to the people to malign the image of the Delhi government.
“The bio-decomposer solution was sprayed on 2000 acres of land across Delhi after the farmers filled the forms. Under the leadership of chief minister Arvind Kejriwal, the people of Delhi have waged a war against pollution. The Delhi government introduced 'Red Light On Gaadi Off' campaign to curb vehicle pollution, anti-dust campaign to combat dust pollution. We also deployed teams and are taking action on biomass burning across Delhi and introduced the bio decomposer technique in association with IARI, Pusa, to combat pollution due to stubble burning in Delhi,” he said.
"BJP leader Vijay Gupta took to the streets to protest against the 'Red Light On Gaadi Off' campaign, but no BJP leader is seen participating in any campaign. They are not doing anything to control dust or biomass burning. Today the garbage mountain is burning, but they are busy playing blame games. The people of Delhi are choking since the last two months due to stubble burning in the neighbouring states of Delhi. The farmers do not have any solution to stubble burning. The experiment of the Delhi government in association with the Pusa institute which has developed a capsule that turns stubble on the fields into manure, has been successful," said Rai.
Rai said that there are 15,000 acres of paddy fields in Delhi, out of which non-basmati rice is grown on 2000 acres of land and the rest of the fields where the basmati rice is grown, go through manual harvesting and not mechanised harvesting, due to which there is no stubble on the fields.
"On October 3rd, the Delhi government ordered 2000 packets of the bio-decomposing solution. In 400 utensils, we used 25 litres of water, 5 pouches (4 capsules in one pouch) in one utensil, 750 gms jaggery and 250 gms of chickpea flour to prepare the solution, which was then stored. On October 5th, 10000 litres of the solution was prepared. The solution was again prepared from 750 gms of jaggery and water to prepare 20000 litres of the solution to spray in 2000 acres of land. The solution was first sprayed on the farmlands in Hiranki village, Narela, on October 13th by the CM, he said.
The Delhi government has the record of the forms filled for spraying the solution on the fields, he said, adding that every form from every village has been collected and kept in our records, a centre was established in Kharkhari Nahar Village to prepare the solution under the guidance of the scientists or the Pusa Institute since it was a new thing for us too.
