Every year around October-November, the air quality in Delhi-NCR and surrounding areas deteriorates to a ‘severe category.’ Starting mid-October, the air becomes so hazardous that it resembles a deadly gas chamber.
By Pushpendra Singh
Recently, the Supreme Court strongly criticised the Central and state governments for their inaction against farmers engaging in stubble burning in Punjab and Haryana. Citing Article 21 of the Constitution, the Court emphasised that citizens have a fundamental right to a pollution-free environment. Despite a significant reduction in farm fire incidents over the years, the current approach of prosecuting and penalising farmers lacks the necessary understanding and traditional approaches needed to solve the problem effectively. The blame placed on farmers by governments, agencies, the press, and courts demonstrates a limited grasp of this complex issue, which actually has a simple, eco-friendly, and cost-effective solution.
Every year around October-November, the air quality in Delhi-NCR and surrounding areas deteriorates to a ‘severe category.’ Starting mid-October, the air becomes so hazardous that it resembles a deadly gas chamber. Despite efforts by various agencies like the Central Pollution Control Board, the Commission for Air Quality Management, and SAFAR, as well as the measures taken by the Central, Delhi, Haryana, Punjab, and Uttar Pradesh governments, they have all failed to curb this pollution for nearly a decade.
Newspapers often highlight images of farmers burning paddy stubble, portraying them as the main culprits. However, the funds spent on machines, stubble management systems, and solutions like happy-seeders, balers, and bio-decomposers have shown no positive results. Consequently, the blame game continues until the situation improves naturally, and then everyone returns to business as usual until the following year.
Let’s examine the so-called ‘main source’ of this pollution- the annual stubble burning exercise and also propose the simplest, cheapest, most effective and sustainable eco-friendly solution to it. The main sources of pollution in the Delhi-NCR are- local traffic, industries, construction works, sweeping of roads, local biomass burning, hotels, restaurants, households, crops residue burning etc. If we factually consider the contribution of stubble burning to this pollution it mostly falls in the range of 5 to 30% on different days during this period, as per the government agencies’ data. Most of the stubble burning is being done by the farmers of Punjab and Haryana, if we ignore a few hundred incidents in other states that don’t have any significant impact.
Stubble burning leads to depletion of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Sulphur, Potassium and other micronutrients that are essential to the soil health and good crop yields. This entails application of extra quantities of these nutrients in the next crop cycle. Since we import huge quantities of these chemical fertilisers and also pay huge amounts of fertiliser subsidies, it raises import bills, increases our current account deficit, fertiliser subsidies and thus fiscal deficit.
The genesis of the problem is the Sub-soil Water Conservation Acts passed in 2009 to conserve the ground water by Punjab and Haryana governments. This law prohibits early paddy plantation, delaying it by 3-4 weeks towards mid-June and beyond so that the paddy plantation in these states is done nearer to the arrival time of Monsoon in July, thus conserving groundwater. Since by law the crop is now planted later, obviously it’s ready for harvesting only later. Thus we have mandatorily delayed the crop cycle by 3-4 weeks. Earlier after completion of paddy harvesting in October the farmers had a window of about 4 to 6 weeks to sow the next Rabi crop mainly wheat but now that window has shrunk by half due to the delayed plantation of paddy. Traditionally the farmers had been harvesting paddy manually that leaves no stubble and is also an eco-friendly method. The labour was available and shifted from field to field completing harvesting over a period of 6 weeks. Paddy is still harvested manually all over India except in Punjab and Haryana where the number of days for harvesting has been halved due to delayed plantation. Due to the smaller window of harvesting all the paddy farmers need labour to harvest fields almost at the same time. So, the manual harvesting labour becomes scarce, very costly and unaffordable. It’s a question of man-days after all- if the number of days is halved, the number of labourers must be doubled to complete the task in time. Consequently, the farmers use machines to harvest the paddy crop but mechanical harvesting leaves about two feet of stubble in the field which has to be burnt to quickly clear the fields for the next crop. Mechanical harvesting and stubble management requires about Rs 4000 per acre which is unaffordable to most of the farmers, so they’re constrained to burn the stubble.
But this practice has huge costs to society and the country. Stubble burning leads to depletion of Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Sulphur, Potassium and other micronutrients that are essential to the soil health and good crop yields. This entails application of extra quantities of these nutrients in the next crop cycle. Since we import huge quantities of these chemical fertilisers and also pay huge amounts of fertiliser subsidies, it raises import bills, increases our current account deficit, fertiliser subsidies and thus fiscal deficit. Stubble burning also releases harmful greenhouse gases that contribute to pollution, global warming and climate change. Also, the earthworms and other useful insects and worms get killed in the burning process. All this has consequences like lower yields and degradation of soil. Mechanical harvesting also uses costly diesel which means more burning of fossil fuels, increased petroleum imports and attendant costs. The pollution and haze in Delhi-NCR also negatively affects tourism, investments and also defames the country.
The best, sustainable and most eco-friendly solution is to harvest paddy manually, it leaves no stubble to burn. After manual harvesting and manual thrashing, paddy residue is used as fodder to feed the animals that convert it into- milk or animal power and cow-dung. A part is used as bedding under animals in the winter. The cow-dung and bedding residue is recycled as natural manure into the fields, all this happens without any pollution. Manual harvesting thus also mitigates the acute fodder shortage problem that leads to higher milk prices for consumers. Natural manure leads to lesser application of chemical fertilisers in the next crop cycle. The crop residue can also be sold to industries that may use it for packaging, making cardboard boxes or other biodegradable items, producing ethanol, electricity generation etc.
For manual harvesting of paddy and subsequent manual stubble management the governments should pay what it costs to do it- about Rs 4000 per acre. The total average area under paddy cultivation in Haryana and Punjab is around 1.10 crore acres, so it’ll cost a meagre amount of Rs 4500 crores to ensure 100% manual harvesting in the two states. MNREGA funds could also be used to partly finance it. If handsome payments are made to the labourers then a large number of labourers would migrate to Punjab and Haryana to do manual harvesting of paddy, as they do every year for paddy plantation in June-July, generating lucrative employment opportunities for them. It’ll also partly mitigate the rural unemployment problem. Defaming and penalising farmers, subsidising costly fossil fuel guzzling machines and blaming others is no solution. The governments only nudged the farmers towards wheat and paddy crops in Punjab and Haryana to ensure the food security of the country when we were dependent on imported food grains to feed our people. We must be grateful to our farmers for turning a foodgrains-deficit and importing country to foodgrains-surplus and exporting country. We can’t push the bill to the farmers or punish them for ensuring the food security of the nation. The farmers can also be nudged towards crop diversification by ensuring legal guarantee of MSP and assured purchase of other crops like coarse cereals, oilseeds and pulses. This will reduce the area under water guzzling crops like paddy in Punjab and Haryana, and also ensure self-reliance in vegetable oils. We import about sixty percent of our edible oils annually. In 2021-22 we spent about $19 billion of foreign exchange to import edible vegetable oils.
Paying for manual harvesting is the cheapest, most eco-friendly and sustainable solution to stubble burning. It saves the water, the air and the earth with least costs. All other options take very heavy toll directly or indirectly in terms of- health costs, soil and environment degradation, global warming, extreme weather events, compromised food security, increased milk prices and food inflation, purchase of air-purifiers, tourism and investments curtailed, schools and institutions closed, banned vehicles, illogical scrapping policy for 10/15 years old vehicles that puts huge costs on the citizens, restricted economic activities, pollution monitoring costs and corruption by enforcement agency employees, wasteful expenditure in smog towers or water sprinklers, increased fertiliser and oil imports, increased subsidies and fiscal deficit, among others. We must pay the farmers so that they switch back to manual harvesting of paddy, it has all the benefits at very low costs to society. When we are talking about spending trillions of dollars to fight global warming, contain carbon emissions and climate change, why not begin by paying a few thousand crore Rupees to the farmers for 100 percent manual harvesting of paddy. It’s worth it, let’s not be penny-wise but pound-foolish.
