A temporary relief

Burning of crop residue needs a lasting solution

Images captured by satellites of US space agency NASA over the past few weeks indicate massive blazes in Punjab and Haryana as well as in western Uttar Pradesh. Every year, such fires choke the neighbouring landscape and its inhabitants. The national capital region of Delhi is the worst affected due to farm fire-driven spikes in pollution because not only is it located in the heart of this intensive agricultural belt where such blazes are common, but also because it has an excess of other pollutants such as vehicular emissions and construction dust. The smoke from burning fields tends to hang low in the relatively cooler atmosphere and combines with other pollutants to form injurious smog. Though farm fires occur twice a year — after the wheat harvest in summer and the paddy harvest in winter — the menace is usually less severe in summer than in winter. Mercifully, the pollution effect of stubble torching has been relatively meagre in the current summer. The saviour this time is the southeasterly wind pattern with air flowing from Delhi towards the smouldering fields of Haryana and Punjab rather than the other way round. However, this agreeable wind pattern is not really a solution — not a lasting one at any rate. Wind direction could reverse any day, in line with the so-called western disturbances, and create a pollution crisis yet again.

The heart of this problem is that while burning of crop residue after harvesting is a critical ecological concern (because of its ruinous impact on the environment), yet farmers view this practice from an economic standpoint. For them, burning residue is the cheapest and quickest way to getting the land ready for the next round of sowing. The government’s efforts to dissuade farmers, by declaring such fires as illegal and imposing fines and imprisonment, essentially falter because they treat it as a law and order problem, with little understanding of the economic logic that goads farmers. For their part, farmers find the cost of compliance greater than the mooted penalties and as such it is not surprising that the government’s deterrence fails to have much impact. This is not to suggest that farmers are completely unaware of the harmful environmental consequences of such fires — the heat stresses the soil and deprives it of several vital nutrients. 

But the available alternatives to burning crop residue are either impractical and time-consuming — such as incorporating the stubble into the soil to let it rot slowly — or are too expensive — such as removing it by using machines. The cost of mechanical disposal of stubble is estimated at over Rs 2,000 an acre (around Rs 5,000 a hectare), which most farmers can ill-afford. A lasting cure for this peril requires finding, through research and development, workable alternatives to stubble torching that are cost-effective and less time-consuming. Solutions should aim either at converting these leftovers into manure through rapid biological degradation or disposing them through affordable mechanical means. Till such options are at hand, the state governments have to incentivise farmers for using machines to rid their fields of unwanted crop remnants without delaying the subsequent crop planting.