"The big problem here could be cooking at home," says Nobel laureate Paul Crutzen of the Max-Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany. Crutzen won the Nobel Prize for his work on discovering the ozone hole.

It is a problem that will now have to be addressed by governments in South Asia, says Prof V. Ramanathan of the Scripps Institute of Oceanography, one of the leading scientists involved in the study, conducted between 1995 and 1999 at a cost of about $40 million.

"The sliver lining to this cloud is that it can be tackled relatively soon if the correct policy decisions are taken," he says.

The Supreme Court of India took the lead in introducing compressed Natural gas (CNG) in buses, taxis and auto-rickshaws in the country. But the court had no idea of the magnitude of the cloud hanging overhead which its order could do nothing to remove.

The cloud cannot be tackled at the level of handling pollution in New Delhi or some ot

The brown clouds these fuels have created over Asia have already led to a 20-40 percent disruption in the monsoon. That has meant more rain in The east and south, and relative drought over northwest India and Pakistan. UNEP executive director Klaus Toepfer says the technological and Financial resources are available to tackle this cloud. What is needed is the "political and moral will to achieve this for the sake of Asia, for the sake of the world". The focus is on India, the principal player and principal polluter."Forget everything else, the Indian government will have to make this its number one priority," says a scientist associated with the project.

It consists of a mass of ash, acids, aerosols and other particles, the result of forest fires, burning agricultural wastes and dramatic increases in the burning of fossil fuels in vehicles, industries and power stations. It also contains the emissions from millions of inefficient cookers burning wood, cow dung and other bio-fuels.

The cloud is not new. It has been visible every northern summer for the past 20 years and was particularly noticeable in 1997 when Indonesian forests were ablaze. And it is getting worse. While North America and Europe have been cleaning up their act in terms of atmospheric pollution and greenhouse emissions,

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