This year, the state witnessed a 30 per cent reduction compared to last year. Its success owes much to the state government's drives to sensitise farmers -- a project in which field staff of agriculture departments and local level officials work closely with people from diverse sections, including religious leaders and teachers. With air quality in the National Capital Region turning from “very poor” to “severe”, farm fires in Punjab have come under the spotlight yet another year. On Wednesday, Union Environment Minister Bhupender Yadav took to Twitter to blame the Aam Aadmi Party-ruled state for “turning Delhi into a gas chamber”. The tweet drew an angry response from Punjab Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann, who appeared on a video to accuse “the Centre and the BJP of unleashing a slanderous campaign against Punjab’s hardworking farmers”. The blame game evokes a distinct sense of deja vu — notwithstanding the change of actors, the drama remains the same. In the past, Delhi’s AAP government would call out its counterparts in Punjab and Haryana for their failure to curb stubble burning. The AAP’s assumption of office in Punjab had led to hopes that the two states would cooperate to rein in the annual pollution. Data from the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), however, shows that farm fire episodes in Punjab have gone up by 19 per cent over last year. On Wednesday, the state registered 3,634 instances of stubble burning, the highest in the season.
There is a ray of hope amid the gloom. Instances of crop residue burning have been coming down in Haryana in the last five years. This year, the state witnessed a 30 per cent reduction compared to last year. Its success owes much to the state government’s drives to sensitise farmers — a project in which field staff of agriculture departments and local level officials work closely with people from diverse sections, including religious leaders and teachers. Haryana’s strategy involves the promotion of machines that help in disposing the crop waste. The state government provides these machines to hiring centres on 80 per cent subsidy and monitors their use. It also arranges moving of the crop waste from the fields to biomass power projects.
In contrast, persuasion has played a lesser role in farm fire control projects in Punjab — under both AAP and Congress regimes. Subsidies offered by the state, by all accounts, have not incentivised a large section of farmers to adopt the crop residue machines. There is now a substantial body of reportage which shows that farmers find these machines uneconomical, even after they are subsidised. The problem is also that the Punjab government has not drawn lessons from its failures or tried to learn from the experiences of neighbours such as Haryana. The state’s latest collaborative project with Delhi is riddled with the same lacuna. The Mann and Kejriwal governments have been pushing for the use of the IARI-developed biodecomposer — it breaks down the crop residue — as an alternative to stubble burning despite several experts, including from the Punjab Agricultural University, warning that it will prove impractical. Putting out farm fires is, no doubt, a complex task. But AAP governments seem to be compounding it with their rigid approach.