A burning issue

Why do farmers persist with a practice like stubble burning that has been proved to gravely impair air quality across a radius of hundreds of kilometers?

The other day, Kaushalya returned after a week celebrating two family weddings somewhere near Jind, Haryana. Most of her husband’s extended family, now working in Delhi, had decided to attend the weddings. “It was just like the old days,” said she. “And the best thing was that with the fields fallow after the wheat harvest, there was plenty of space to do all this.” This wasn’t, apparently, a coincidence. Her husband’s brother and father of the bride, had timed the wedding with the harvest. Not only did he have some extra cash in hand from the sale of the harvest, the cleared fields offered ample space for a large wedding tent. “In fact, the tent was put up for a week for both the weddings, and all of us camped outdoors,” she narrated. “And because there was so much smoke in the air, there were no mosquitoes to bug us.”

My ears cocked instantly. I’d read a news item that crop stubble was still being burnt in Punjab and Haryana despite the National Green Tribunal ban on it. Could the smoke have been from that? She was quite matter-of-fact about it. “Of course we knew the smoke was from crop residue burning in the fields,” she said. But what were poor farmers to do, she asked. They had to clear their fields after all. The going rate for daily wage labourers around their village had gone up from ~150 in the good old days to double of that today. “And around this time, knowing that farmers need labour for the harvest and clearing the field after that, daily wagers tend to jack up their rates further.” Also, removing the crop stubble manually takes a lot of time — “even more so when the labourers are on a daily wage system”, she added wryly. Since the time after harvest and before sowing the winter crop is also prime wedding season, farmers like Kaushalya’s brother-in-law didn’t have the luxury of time either. 

In fact this year, the clearing of his field had been fraught with pitfalls. His crop had been particularly good, but it had rained for a couple of days just before the harvest. “My family here spent many sleepless nights, as excess rainfall could have ruined the harvest or at least rendered the stubble too moist to burn efficiently,” she said. I understood... somewhat. But why do farmers persist with a practice that had been proved to gravely impair air quality across a radius of hundreds of kilometers? I wondered how toxic the air quality would be at ground zero, so as to speak. 

“Not bad at all,” she replied. The smoke and ash from the fields, said Kaushalya, had many benefits. Not only did farmers consider ash to be a good fertiliser, the smoke and fire also repelled agricultural pests like blue bulls (locally called nilgai) and the occasional wild boar, as well as mosquitoes. Consequently, though most of her rural kith and kin knew about the ban on stubble burning, they did it anyway. The government could not impose a ban on stubble burning, Kaushalya felt, and expect poor farmers to bear the added cost burden. Which was why crop stubble burning was still a common, though now a surreptitious practice. “In the week I spent there, I never saw any fires during the day,” said she, surmising that farmers probably set fire to their fields in the dead of night to avoid detection and punishment. “After all,” said she, “one does what one does to survive…”