Stubble burning: Measures miss ground realities

Mahavir Saxena loves his morning walks. But as the national capital starts experiencing nippy mornings, the septuagenarian prefers staying home, to avoid walking through the smog-filled city.

During the winter, low winds and the Himalayas looming on one side trap vehicular and industrial pollutants over the national capital region (NCR). On some days, a gentle breeze also brings along smoke from farm fires lit in Punjab, which engulfs the capital city, confining residents like Saxena and others with respiratory illness to their homes.

The problem of the stubble burning is at least a decade old, as Punjab and Haryana enacted laws to arrest the depletion of groundwater resources and specified dates for the sowing of paddy. The delayed sowing, closer to the seasonal monsoon rains, has pushed the harvest cycle to October, leaving little time for farmers to prepare the farm for the rabi crop.

As stubble burning presents fresh challenges to a city already reeling under pollution, governments have responded with increased emphasis on farm mechanisation, encouraging farmers to use combine harvesters, straw management systems, and balers for effective stubble management.

The governments of Punjab and Haryana have also set up centres to rent out machinery to farmers at a nominal charge and free of cost to small and marginal farmers.

However, the catch here is that these machines would be of help only if farmers own tractors powerful enough to haul these machines across their field. Over 68% farmers here are small and marginal farmers and many of them do not own a tractor. Tractor rentals, which cost Rs 1,200 per acre, is not an attractive proposition for them. Most of them, then opt for the easy way out — burning the stubble.

According to the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority (EPCA) for NCR, the government is also promoting the use of farm residue to generate electricity through captive power plants attached to large industries in the region, besides offering paddy straw and other farm residues to fire the boilers in distilleries that dot the two states.

A number of bio-CNG plants are also in the pipeline in the two states that would make use of farm residue for the generation of compressed bio-gas, the EPCA said in its recent report.

The scale of the problem is humungous — Punjab and Haryana together generate nearly 40 million tonnes of paddy and other crop residues every year, and it is going to be a while before a sustainable solution is found.