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,