“Paddy stubble is the left over after harvesting the crop and it can measure as much as a quintal in an acre (25 quintal per hectare) of paddy farm,” said Kurukshetra Kishan Sabha General Secretary, Pratap Singh Dhariwal.
There are two options to dispose of the stubble, which is used as either fodder or to manufacture cardboard. Farmers can either plough the field repeatedly — as many as five times, according to Dhariwal — or take the easier way out by sprinkling kerosene on the field and lighting it up. Despite this destroying the soil’s nutrients, it is a substantially easier and cheaper alternative.
According to the Additional Director of Agriculture of Haryana, Suresh Kumar, the government bans the burning of paddy. When Joint Director of Agriculture, Haryana, RS Chahal was contacted, he suggested many schemes, from buying the leftover to turning it into fuel or manure and even selling agriculture shredders to farmers on subsidy.
“This is not a new problem, it has been there for a long time,” Chahal said. Yet the state governments are not prepared with a solution to the problem. He suggested schemes that are all prospective initiatives which the government “will” take up in the future. “This is not just our problem, it is a worldwide problem,” he said, when asked why nothing specific was being done to address this concern.
Director Agriculture, Punjab, Jasbir Singh Bains said that the state government is working on many schemes. “We have sent a scheme of Rs 2 crore to the central government. It’ll provide machinery to the farmers like shredders, choppers on a subsidised rate to get rid of the waste,” he said, but had no answer when asked about the absence of any working schemes.
Currently, paddy cultivation in the two states is mammoth, as is the resultant waste. “We have 30,62,000 hectares of farm land under paddy cultivation,” Bains said. This brings the paddy stubble quantity in Punjab to a staggering 7,65,50,000 quintals (total area under cultivation x waste per hectare). Add to this Haryana’s 3,00,00,000 quintals of paddy waste and you get the actual amount of waste in the two states –10,65,50,000 quintals.
And while it may be seen easy to dismiss this as solely the fault of farmers of the region, other factors are involved.
“Why are farmers blamed for this? It’s the machinery. Why is nobody blaming the manufacturers of the combine harvesters?” commented Devinder Sharma, a food policy analyst from Punjab. The combine harvesters leave six to eight inches of stalk when used to harvest paddy. This wasn’t the case when done manually. “The manufacturers of these harvesters should add a system to chop off the remaining stalk too while harvesting,” Sharma adds.
The crop fires choking North India aren’t an unsolvable problem. The problem is who will implement the solutions? As long as the administrative attitude is that of passing the buck — “we are just an advisory body,” Chahal said — every year, North Indian states will be breathless because burning the leftover is simply more cost efficient.
The impact is not just limited to Delhi even though it is the capital’s air quality gets the most press.