Smoke swirls through the air in Punnawal village, Sangrur district, Punjab. It’s an afternoon in November when the weather is ‘just right’ to take a nap under a tree; but for the air — putrid with a thick grey haze. There are at least three tear- and cough-inducing fires on paddy fields along one of the few pucca roads in the village.
A little into Punnawal, a kachha road leads to a charred field where Jarnail Singh (name changed to protect privacy), 60, is driving his tractor. The farmer, who owns six acres of farmland, along with his son and relatives, set his field on fire earlier in the day. He is sowing wheat in a field covered with ash. This is a yearly winter occurrence that has impacted north India since the late noughties, when the still, cold air traps smoke from these fires, the post-Deepavali gunpowder effect, and vehicular and industrial pollution.
Jarnail’s 10-year-old nephew sits on the rear side of the tractor enjoying the action. On a field next to his, a Punjabi song blares from a speaker attached to a tractor. The child keeps tune. There too the farmer sows the next crop — wheat — on his charred field. The boy’s face and clothes are black in patches, from the soot. Farm fires have been banned by the courts at least since 2013.
“We tried not setting the field on fire last year and decided to sell the stubble for cattle feed instead,” Jarnail says. “So, I cut the stubble using machines and collected some from nearby fields too, but the buyer was paying so little that I lost over ₹50,000 in diesel and tractor running.”
This year, the smoke from at least 4,755 fires across Punjab has drifted across the Gangetic plain, and into Delhi, about 250 km away. The national capital now has an air quality index (AQI) that has reached 382. Levels up to 50 are safe; over 300 are ‘very poor’. This has perturbed bureaucrats and politicians, who fear the diminishing of Delhi from a world-class city to a “gas chamber”, as news headlines have put it over the past 15 years or so, since winter air pollution has reached crisis levels.
“Delhi is far away; it is us who suffer more. The smoke makes it hard for us to breathe,” says Jarnail. The AQI in Patiala, the closest city, is at 270, considered ‘poor’. “Par majboori hai (We are helpless).” The ‘helpless’ refrain echoes across villages in Punjab and Haryana because of the lack of protective government policies.
Every paddy harvest season (September 15 to November 30), stubble burning has contributed up to 50% of Delhi’s air pollution. This year, it hit its highest on November 1, at 35.1%. However, the fires have come down in Punjab and Haryana. In 2023, they fell by 27% in Punjab to 36,663, compared with 2022. In Haryana, they fell by 37% to 2,303 in the same period, according to Central government data. However, aircraft descending into Delhi and Chandigarh, the State capital of Punjab and Haryana, see a bleak grey blanket.
This season, Delhi’s levels of PM2.5 (particulate matter 2.5) is over 10 times the World Health Organization’s safe number. PM2.5 are fine, inhalable particles that can be absorbed into the bloodstream and are linked to long-term health problems like stroke, cancer, and lung disease.
It’s now 4 p.m. in Punnawal. Two more farm fires come alive. The sun, seen through a veil of smoke, sinks into the blackness. A ‘burnt’ smell hangs heavy — on the village roads, on everyone’s clothes. Sangrur, the birthplace of Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, from the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP), has registered the highest number of farm fires in the State this season and last year. Sangrur produces one of the largest amounts of rice in the State.
Stubble (parali in Punjabi) being burnt to remove paddy crop residue from a field in Kaithal district, Haryana.
| Photo Credit:
SHASHI SHEKHAR KASHYAP
The shrinking window of cultivation
Six years ago, the Centre launched a much-touted scheme to provide 50-80% subsidies to farmers to buy a range of machines to manage the leftover stubble after harvesting paddy. About 2.5 lakh machines later, Pakistan has alleged that the smoke from farm fires has crossed the border into Lahore, making it the most polluted city in the world. A ‘smog war room’ has been set up to tackle the cross-border problem.
In the early 2010s, the courts started to take note of stubble burning. The Central government in 2014, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, formulated a national policy to manage crop residue, followed by the 2018 subsidy promise. Many in Delhi’s high, air-conditioned offices thought they had cracked the problem.
Over the years, the Central government has pumped in hundreds of crores of rupees in the form of subsidies for 2.5 lakh CRM (crop residue management) machines just in Punjab and Haryana. Yet, stubble burning continues.
Jarnail’s son loads seeds into the super-seeder attached to the tractor. They have it on rent for ₹2,000 a day. The Central government’s 2018 intervention was focused on dealing with stubble in two ways: in situ, like super-seeders, where the stubble is ploughed back into the field and wheat sown at the same time; and ex situ, where a baler compacts the residue into blocks or rolls to be taken to factories for fuel. But before using a baler, the standing straw has to be cut using a cutting or chopping machine, and after it dries, arranged into lines using a raker.
All this takes time and money. The window between harvesting of paddy and sowing of wheat is only about three to four weeks. This year, the window has shrunk as paddy procurement by the Centre is delayed, so farmers are going slow on the harvest. Both the super-seeder and the baler need powerful tractors, which many small farmers do not own.
Sporting a pair of green slippers and a kurta smeared with ash from the field, Jarnail says, “A matchbox costs ₹1.” Besides, farmers who don’t burn stubble are not compensated.
Incentives vs coercion
For almost a decade, the Punjab government has been asking the Central government for a direct incentive of ₹2,500 per acre, so farmers can manage the stubble and not burn it. The State government has proposed a sharing formula of ₹1,500 by the Centre and ₹500 each by the AAP governments in Punjab and Delhi. The Centre has so far said no. Asked why the AAP governments are not giving ₹1,000 to farmers despite the Centre not providing its share of ₹1,500, an AAP spokesperson did not offer any comment.
Many farmers say the incentive can go a long way in solving the problem. “If adequate incentive is given and a farmer still sets the stubble ablaze, then our union will support the government in taking action against the farmer,” says Major Singh, 68, a resident of Punnawal village and vice president (Punjab unit) of the Left-affiliated All India Kisan Sabha that advocates for farmers’ rights and sectoral reforms.
After the Supreme Court pulled up both the Punjab and Haryana governments for not taking action against people who were involved in burning stubble this year, both States have registered FIRs, imposed fines, and marked ‘red entries’ on revenue records of farmers, indicating that farmers cannot take a loan or sell land easily.
With farmer unions being strong in both States, protests demanding withdrawal of actions have seen the governments pull back on acting against farmers in the past.
The push for paddy
In the 1960s, India began a thrust for food security with the ‘Green Revolution’, a movement that involved research for high-yielding rice and wheat seeds, and more productive farm practices. Devinder Sharma, a food and trade policy analyst, says, “The government pushed farmers to grow paddy. Didn’t they know it would generate more stubble? Guzzle more water?” He feels coercion will not work; a subsidy may.
Punjab was not a rice-growing State and used to sow cotton among other crops in May and June, and wheat in October and November. Watered as it is by the five rivers, as any middle-school student knows, the State started sowing paddy in the May-June cycle.
In the 1980s, with the mechanisation of farming, farmers started using combine harvesters. These machines would cut only the top part of the paddy and leave the longer stubble — about 50-60 cm long — standing in the fields. The same paddy cut by hand would leave behind about 5-10-cm-long residue. The shorter stubble could be easily ploughed back into the earth; the longer stubble couldn’t.
Another turning point was the Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act, passed in 2009, which allowed the planting of paddy only after June 15. This was done to preserve groundwater as planting in peak summer would have consumed even more groundwater. This delayed the planting of paddy and further shortened the window between the harvesting of paddy in October-November and sowing of wheat, generally before November 15.
Sharma cautions against turning Punjab into “a junkyard for machines”. He says, “Already about 50,000 of the 1.5 lakh CRM machines in Punjab have become redundant.” He alleges that government officials receive kickbacks from private companies that manufacture the machines.
Across the border, in Haryana
Though only 90 km from Sangrur, farm fires are fewer in Haryana’s Kaithal district, at 161 this year, so far the highest in the State. A State government scheme has made the difference.
At Bhunna village in the district, a 60-year-old farmer, who owns 16 acres of farmland with his brother, says he sold the stubble to a contractor, who came and took it away.
“I have stopped setting stubble on fire. Last year also I did the same and I later got ₹1,000 per acre from the government,” he says. “Most of the others who did the same also got the incentive.”
The contractor, after lifting the stubble from the field, gives the farmer a receipt, which he submits to the government and the incentive is deposited into his account. “He left behind a few bundles, and we had to set them on fire, but they were very few,” he adds.
The road from Kaithal town to Bhunna is flanked by blocks of straw stacked in fields. These will be taken by private contractors to the green energy SAEL Kaithal Renewable Energy Pvt. Ltd. (Haryana), a privately-owned company producing 18MW of electricity a day from the stubble.
About 45 acres adjoining the plant have been rented out by the company to store the bales and blocks of compacted straw, stacked two to three storeys high. “We lost some of the bales to self-ignition. It happens more in cylindrical bales and we have now moved to rectangular blocks,” says a supervisor at the factory, which started production in 2022. He claims that the company purchases about 1.5 lakh tonnes of bale every year from contractors, but it is just a fraction of the total stubble generated in Kaithal district. This year too, there are fields aflame in Haryana, the smoke tightening the chest, making eyes water.
Several such power generation factories and biomass power plants have come up in Punjab and Haryana to use stubble. More are in the pipeline, according to officials. However, some farmers in Sangrur say they had to simply hand over their stubble bales to contractors and pay them ₹1,000 per acre for collection from their fields.
The problem with paddy
Last month, demanding compensation from the Centre, the Punjab Chief Minister said the farmers in the State do not want to grow paddy anymore as the groundwater level is diminishing. He added that they are doing it as there is no alternative crop procured by the Central government at a fixed minimum support price (MSP).
Harbans Singh, chief agriculture officer (Sangrur), says crop diversification is the long-term solution, but nothing substantial is being done by the Central government towards it.
Meanwhile, sitting on a metal charpoy next to a field on a road to Pedni Kalan village in Sangrur, Kuldeep Singh, 37, and five other farmers say they used to grow sugarcane, which consumes less than 25% of water than paddy does, but they had to sell it to a private player at low rates.
“I started growing sugarcane in two-three acres in 2008 and by 2014 it had increased to 60 acres (including fields taken on lease). It was going better than paddy,” says Kuldeep. In 2017, the company started delaying payments to farmers, and finally closed down in 2022 without paying dues to many farmers, he alleges. “Now all of us grow paddy. The government is not helping in any way to promote alternative crops.”
Behind them, in the distance, a field is on fire. Smoke blows in the wind; the answers don’t.
Published – November 08, 2024 12:21 am IST
