Reducing air pollution: Stubble burning needs economic solutions

With the paddy-harvesting season almost at hand, none of the northern rice-growing states seems to have a workable strategy in place to prevent farmers from burning crop residues, which aggravates air pollution in the National Capital Region in October-November every year. The massive amount of smoke and toxic gases that the crop fires exude causes health problems, ranging from eye and breathing troubles to more serious illnesses. The offer of the Delhi and Punjab governments to spray the microbial stubble decomposer, developed by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, on the harvested paddy fields has been rejected by the farmers as an impractical proposition. It takes 20-25 days to decompose the leftover biomass, which is too long for them to wait for sowing the next crop. The use of crop residue management machinery, which seems a feasible solution, involves additional expenses, which the farmers find unaffordable without financial assistance. Such assistance does not seem to be forthcoming in most states.

Several types of machines are now available to manage paddy stubbles in quick time to ensure timely planting of the next crop, which is the main aim of the farmers for setting their fields ablaze. Devices like Happy Seeders and Super Seeders can sow the new crop without removing the paddy remnants from the fields. Some bigger machines can harvest paddy, cut the straw into pieces, and spread them on the ground or tie them into bundles in a single operation. But these are costly machines, which individual farmers cannot buy. Though state governments subsidise the cost of these machines for cooperative societies and other custom-hiring service providers, they, for inexplicable reasons, do not offer financial aid to farmers to meet the charges for their use.

Haryana is the only state that offers Rs 2,500 per acre for this purpose but the farmers find the amount too little to cover the costs. For them, torching the remnants is the quickest and, more importantly, the cheapest way to vacate the fields for fresh sowing. It is, therefore, clear that stubble burning is essentially an economic issue that requires an economic solution. Unlike wheat straw, which is commonly used as animal feed and sells at good prices, rice is unfit to be fed to cattle because of its high content of unpalatable silica, and, therefore, has little market value. Unless rice straw is also converted into an economic good, farmers would have no incentive to spend money on disposing it of in an environmentally safe manner.

Fortunately, there is no dearth of potential gainful uses of crop residues. These include making various kinds of paper and hard boards, fuel briquettes for replacing coal in thermal plants, or converting them into biofuel for blending with petrol. Haryana has already set up a 2G ethanol plant in Panipat, near the Indian Oil Corporation’s refinery, to produce alcohol from paddy and other agricultural wastes. A lasting solution to the menace of stubble burning, therefore, lies in making it a source of income for the farmers by promoting such economic uses of this biomass. The supply chain for collecting crop residues from fields and making them available to the end-users would come up as a matter of course, as has happened in the areas around Panipat.