Amarjit Sharma, a farmer from Faridkot, Punjab, is an outlier among farmers of Punjab. A character in Shah Syed’s journalistic documentary Stubble: The Farmer’s Bane, Sharma is among a minority of organic farmers in Punjab who don’t grow paddy on his farm. He has diverse crops, and he doesn’t burn the stubble of his crops after harvest as the majority of farmers in North Indian states do. In other words, he doesn’t have “yield syndrome”, a term that comes up in the film.

Large scale open burning of crop residue, also known as stubble, left after the rice harvest in North Indian states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, takes place during the onset of winter — from October to November. The end of October witnesses peak burning on fields, which is a definitive propeller of the toxic air pollution levels that have worsened over the years in Delhi and its peripheries.

Syed’s film offers a startling statistic towards the end of the film: Between October and November of 2022 and 2023, there was a 26% reduction in stubble burning, but pollution levels kept rising during these years. It would probably take a few years before the impact of stubble-related pollution shows a decline, the experts interviewed in the film say.

Syed’s film delves into this phenomenon to present an eloquent perspective — the perspective of the farmer. The farmers of Punjab have been subjects of other documentaries in recent times, including Nishtha Jha’s Farming the Revolution (2024), an immersive film which captured the intense energies of Punjabi farmers and their families during their protests in the peripheries of Delhi, demanding, among other things, a legal guarantee for the Minimum Support Price (MSP) for all crops. Bedabrata Payne’s Déjà Vu, an anti-corporate anti-monopoly narrative chronicling the existential threat through the eyes of American farmers, has some memorable footage documenting the farmer’s protests in Delhi. Stubble: Then Farmer’s Bane is an addition to a narrow but rich tradition of what already looks like a genre: The agro documentary.

Through multiple perspectives — farmers who choose to burn the stubble of their crops, farmers who embrace risk by not burning the stubble, agricultural experts and activists — Syed shoots the film with care and aesthetic rigour even though the frames mostly populate crop fields and interviewees responding to his questions in Punjabi.

Stubble: The Farmer’s Bane is a fine example of what Syed calls “multi-media journalism” — a genre he is devoted to, after having filmed and worked with several wildlife filmmakers. A graduate in filmmaking from Jamia Millia Islamia, Delhi, he says his love for filming the wild seemed limiting to him after several years doing it because, as he says, “a lot of the ancillary issues that affect the common person are ruled out”. “You place your camera to capture the mega fauna and the tiger’s intrigue, but never the lives of people living on peripheries,” Syed explains.

His has a lot of the visual flourishes that a wildlife film would have — barren land with serpentine fires over stubbles captured in top angles, the camera probing expressions and body languages of farmers, and an overall visual language that captures the toil, hopes, risks and frustrations in a farmer’s life. It opens with a farmer, doused in uncertainty and the gravel of fields, saying that they are left with no solution but to burn stubble after harvest. Is that perspective true? Through interviews with experts and other farmers, the story unravels.

“The media has been relentless in blaming the farmer, mostly the Punjabi farmer, for Delhi’s toxic air. Often, as I found out through the making of this film over a couple of months, this is often a desperate attempt to keep yield going,” Syed says. Pranay Lal, author and biochemist, explains that stubble is just one part of what causes air pollution; it’s also Delhi’s geography and density of population. As Upendra Dutt, director of the Kheri Viraat Mission in Punjab explains, the culprit is the adoption of paddy in Punjab. Paddy is unsuited to its soil and ecology and paddy takes up a lot of water — 5,337 litres for 1 kg of rice, according to Syed’s research. In October, which is usually when paddy is harvested, most farmers have no choice but to burn the stubble left after harvest to start sowing wheat.

And then there’s the outlier. Parwinder Singh Laly, a second generation farmer, has been farming organic crops on his soil for the past five years by using a mulching machine to treat stubbles on his farm — a technology many farmers in North India are beginning to adopt. Amarjit Sharma, who has been using stubble as manure for his organic farm explains why he grows only those crops that his family uses in their kitchen — crops suited to Punjab’s climate and soil ecology. He prefers risk and a soil unspoiled by pesticide and burnt stubbles to more yield and better income.

One of the interviewees in the film explains why farming is less about profit and more about faith and belief, another explains the “burden of sorrow” that farmers live with or the risk and uncertainty that forever plague a farming life. The beauty of Syed’s visual language is that it brings out these lived realities and emotions without actually spelling them out.

Budget: ₹5.5 lakh

Running time: 35 minutes

Language: Punjabi, Hindi & English

Short Stream is a monthly curated section, in which we present an Indian short film that hasn’t been seen before or not widely seen before but are making the right buzz in the film industry and film festival circles. We stream the film for a month on HT Premium, the subscription-only section in hindustantimes.com.

Sanjukta Sharma is a Mumbai-based writer and film critic. Write to her at sanjukta.sharma@gmail.com.