A few Days before Diwali, New Delhi had been left choking with polluted air, foul and poisonous, leading to a health emergency. If air pollution during the three weeks period around Diwali in 2017 was bad, 2019 was still worse. The spike in air pollution, measured through the worsening air quality index (AQI) was blamed on the burning of paddy stubbles in the fields of north India. There is no denying that paddy harvesting season in Punjab, Haryana and parts of western Uttar Pradesh does aggravate the bad air quality in New Delhi and also causes severe air pollution in the
Indo-Gangetic plains itself but a continuous media howl had projected farmers as the culprit, as if they were doing it deliberately.
Facing flak from various agencies, including the National Green Tribunal (NGT), a large number of farmers indulging in burning the stubble left in the fields were hounded, imposed with fines , threatened with withdrawal of subsidies, and First Information Reports (FIRs) lodged against them. Treating the fire incidents as cognisable offence, farmers have been treated like petty criminals. While state governments were using satellite data to pin down farmers who resorted to crop residue burning, there is no denying that a lot of initiatives were taken by farmers, including mulching and composting, in an effort to look for alternatives. The Prime
Minister himself had mentioned in his radio talk Mann ki baat on 28 October, 2018 at least two initiatives by Punjab farmers who had vowed not to resort to stubble burning. But a large section of farmers had remained defiant, more so as
an expression of indignation, at the refusal of the policy makers to understand the difficulties they faced.
Knowing that coercive methods against farmers will not work, and realising that farmers have little choice but to put the paddy stubbles on fire given the short window before the wheat sowing season begins, the Punjab Chief Minister Captain Amarinder Singh had written to the Prime Minister seeking an incentive of Rs 100 per quintal to be given to farmers, which comes to roughly Rs 2,500 per acre, so as to offset the additional cost that farmers are expected to incur to manage the paddy stubbles without resorting to flaming. 2017 was the third year in a row when the Punjab Chief Minister had literally pleaded for an incentive to be given to farmers to stamp-out stubble burning. While his plea was summarily turned down, a senior official of the Ministry of Agriculture had even told the NGT in October that the government was not at all considering any incentive to be provided to farmers. It clearly showed that the thrust to control stubble burning was not on directly engaging farmers but more on pushing machine as the answer.
Citing lack of resources, not only the Chief Minister’s request for an economic stimulus package of Rs 2,000-crore, but a joint proposal two years back by Niti Aayog and Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) seeking Rs 3,000-crore to tide over the air pollution crisis emanating from burning of paddy straw was also turned down. It becomes pertinent to mention here that in 2017, Rs. 3000 crore was required by Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and UP to combat the air pollution problem out of which Rs. 1500 crore was needed by Punjab alone. But the requirement could not be fulfilled as both the central and the state governments said that there was lack of funds. If only the government had put on hold the one per cent increase in dearness allowance (DA) for employees in 2017, and diverted the resources to find an amicable solution for in situ management of paddy stubble, probably New Delhi would have escaped the fury of deadly smog in 2019. This would have also brought relief to people living in the farming belt of northwest region.
If only wiser sense had prevailed in 2019 and the Centre had allocated
Rs 3,000-crores from the prescribed outlay of Rs 16,000-crore for DA installment announced before Diwali to tackle stubble burning, New Delhi would have been saved from substantial healthcare costs. More so at a time when farmer unions had been demanding an incentive of Rs 200 per quintal to cover the cost of managing paddy stubbles without burning, and had promised not to put the paddy straw on fire, there appears to be no plausible reason for denying them the stimulus. Instead, farmers were chased, and FIRs filed against them.
A few weeks ago, the Supreme Court saw merit in the argument and directed the
Punjab, Haryana and UP governments to provide a bonus of Rs 100 per quintal to paddy growers. Coming a little late in the season, when almost 90 per cent of the standing crop had been harvested, the Supreme Court’s directive has not had any visible impact. The damage in 2019 had already been done. But if implemented in the right earnest, after careful strategic planning and scrutiny, the incentive that Supreme Court has provided for the farmers can truly serve as the motivating factor to put an end to stubble burning in future. Let the farmer use manual labour or machines or a combination of both to clear the stubble. A beginning can be made by first withdrawing the FIRs filed against farmers to build up their confidence, and then engage with them to find ways and means to successfully dispose the huge biomass generated.
Farmers do realise that putting the crop fields on fire is first and foremost bad for the health of their families, understand its ill-effects on soil microbial structure and the environment, but find it uneconomical to take care of the paddy stubble. After the paddy has been harvested by Combine Harvesters and the grain taken to the mandis, clearing the field for the next sowing of wheat or potato, all in a short period of two to three weeks, adds to the farmer’s input costs. With or without straw management machines, what has not been acknowledged is that there is an additional cost which farmers have to incur. Considering that farm incomes are very low, and agriculture is already in the throes of a severe crisis, putting the harvested fields on fire is therefore the cheapest and easiest way of clearing the crop fields. Knowing the tremendous role farmers play in producing food for the country, here was an opportunity for the society, government and the private sector to come together and
find a workable solution.
Let us not forget, Punjab alone produces more than 20-million tonnes of paddy straw every year and it is not that easy to manage the huge volume generated. The only possible way to manage the huge biomass is to work with farmers. Considering that Punjab has 10.78 Lakhs active MNREGA job cards, here was an opportunity to use farm labour judiciously in combating the crisis. To address the recurring problem, agricultural scientists and farm officials had suggested a set of machines as a‘fitting solution' to curb stubble burning. In the past two years, more than 50,000 crop residue management machines have been made available to farmers in Punjab at 50 per cent subsidy if purchased individually, or at 80 per cent subsidy for cooperative societies or farm clubs. Of the nearly Rs 1,152-crores allocated as subsidy for machines in the northwest region by the Centre for, about Rs 669-crores have been spent by Punjab on subsidising the machines in the past two years. Machines like Happy Seeder, chopper, cutter, mulcher, mould board plough, shrub cutter etc., in addition to making it compulsory for combine harvester machines to come attached with super straw management equipment that will cut and spread the biomass in the field. For machines, which are used barely for a few days during the season, farmers find it uneconomical to spend an astronomical amount initially and then see these machines lying idle for the rest of the year.
Already, in Punjab there are about 4.5-lakh. Tractors against the requirement of 1-lakh tractors. In addition, there are numerous other machines, including heavy machinery, that are used on the farm. The addition of a newer set of machines to manage paddy crop residue will certainly lead to over-mechanisation, which is increasingly being seen as a significant factor behind agrarian distress. The way the machines were pushed, with the government more than willing to provide subsidy, stubble burning seems to have come as a bonanza for farm equipment manufacturers. The lobbies had worked overtime, with many newspapers suggesting that these machines should be made available at 90 per cent subsidy to individual farmers. At this suggested rate of mechanisation, many fear that Punjab will sooner than later turn into a junkyard for farm machinery.
Instead of dwelling into a blame game, and building up a public hysteria against farmers, the effort should be to first understand and ascertain the root cause that has led to the crisis. The intensive wheat-paddy crop rotation that Punjab was pushed into was based on a calculated decision taken by policy makers at a time when India was living in “ship-to-mouth" existence, when food would come directly from the ship into the hungry mouths. After the remarkable turnaround in wheat production,
following the planting of dwarf wheat varieties in the mid-1960s, rice was added to the crop rotation. Punjab was traditionally not a paddy growing area, but the country needed to be food secure. With assured prices by way of a minimum support price (MSP) to farmers and an assured procurement system wherein the Food Corporation of India (FCI) was set up to mop the huge crop harvest, Punjab (including regions that now form Haryana) became the food bowl of the country.
Over the years, as wheat-rice crop rotation stabilised, efforts were to push for increased crop productivity. The resulting second-generation environmental impacts, essentially from depletion of soil nutrients from an exhaustive crop rotation, and the fall in groundwater table at an alarming rate, became clearly visible in the early 1980s. The policy response was to diversify the cropping pattern, moving away from water guzzling paddy to other crops, including maize. Two reports on crop
diversification by the noted economist Dr S S Johl had spelled out a number of measures to diversify the cropping pattern. Punjab did try for pushing in sunflower and maize to replace paddy, but in a half-hearted manner, and the experiments failed.
Unless there was a guaranteed price and added procurement benefits farmers found it unreasonable to make a shift from paddy, and rightly so. Although the MSP for paddy (and for that matter any other crop) does not even cover the cost of production, farmers still prefer to grow paddy as the minimum price announced is at least guaranteed. At the same time, while a lot of blame is being shifted to the policy of providing free power in agriculture, the fact remains that with MSP being deliberately kept low to provide cheaper food to consumer, free power was a political answer to partly offset the losses farmers were incurring. Farmer unions
had time and again said that if they were provided with the legitimate output prices there would have been no need for free electricity. In other words, the point that has been completely missed from public debates is that what seems to be a subsidy for farmers was in reality a subsidy for consumers.
Free electricity certainly led to an increased withdrawal of ground water. With 5,337 litres of water required to produce one kilogram of rice, Punjab is literally mining ground water. But then farmers cannot be blamed entirely (some savings could have been made) for pulling out precious groundwater. They did what was expected from them to increase production. For the state government, knowing that water table was getting depleted, one plausible policy response to reduce over exploitation of groundwater was to do away with the short duration sathi crop, cultivated in April-May, and to delay the sowing of paddy. In view of the urgent need to save water, it enacted the Punjab Preservation of Subsoil Water Act 2009, which shifted the date of paddy transplanting from June 1 to June 20 (and after the Congress government was sworn in, it was advanced to June 13). The shift in paddy transplanting by a fortnight surely delayed the harvest, which meant that stubble burning coincided with the period when movement of air over Delhi NCR remains subdued.
The delay in transplanting paddy therefore came in for a lot of criticism. But as a senior Punjab government official explained, a delay in transplanting by seven days saves 1,000 billion litres of water. In other words, the delay in transplanting by roughly a fortnight – by shifting transplanting period from June 1 to June 13 -- would save Punjab 2,000 billion litres of water. Considering the studies that say Punjab will run out of water in another 25 years, any effort to save ground water should be lauded. This assumes importance given the findings of a study by Centre for International Projects Trust (CIPT), a non-profit backed by the Colombia University, which has on the basis of elaborate simulation studies, concluded that crop diversification may not eventually help in checking the groundwater balance. The shift to maize, which is considered to be less water-guzzling, may therefore not make much of a difference to ground water balance eventually but because it doesn’t leave any stubble to be burnt may still be a better option. But this has to be accompanied with a guaranteed price support system supported by the Centre.
To say at a time when India ranks 102 in the Global Hunger Index spanning 117 countries, that paddy production is in surplus and the granaries are overflowing is a reflection on gross food (mis)management. When the country needed food, farmers were applauded for turning the country self-sufficient. They were the country’s heroes. Instead of painting them now as villains and blaming them squarely for the unmanageable food surpluses as well as the resulting environmental damages, the need is to examine where and how policies went wrong, and what appropriate policy corrections could have been made.
Policy makers will now have to visualise the kind of policy mix required in the short-term, medium-term and beyond. While shifting from paddy cultivation may take some time, the immediate focus should be on how to curtail stubble burning. With Punjab agreeing to provide farmers with an incentive of Rs 2,500 per acre for in situ management of paddy stubble, and hoping that Haryana and Uttar Pradesh will follow suit, stamping out crop residue burning will require combination of approaches, including looking for alternatives like power generation. But more importantly, knowing the ill-will that has been generated over the years, it will require deft handling involving the farming community, various stake holders and more importantly the society at large. The bigger question however is whether the Centre and the State governments are willing to take on priority the urgent need to reduce stubble burning. #
