Incentives, fines: Plan ready to cut crop fires

GURGAON: In preparation for the annual paddy harvest season that will begin soon, Haryana has mapped out villages where farm fires are frequent, set up control rooms and teams for enforcement, and offered incentives to deter farmers from burning crop residues.
Last year, stubble burning in Haryana was down by almost half (48%) compared to the winter months of 2021, the government had said.

Every winter, air quality in Delhi-NCR plummets to dangerous levels as the region gets blanketed under toxic haze due to a combination of cold and still weather conditions, along with emissions. Farm fires, commonly seen in north India's agricultural belt to clear tracts of land for another round of sowing after the paddy harvest, are among key sources of pollution at this time of the year.
Agriculture department officials said on Tuesday they are focusing on 729 villages scattered across 12 districts -Ambala, Fatehabad, Hisar, Jind, Karnal, Kurukshetra, Panipat, Rohtak, Kaithal, Yamunanagar, Sonipat and Palwal. Of these villages, 147 have been categorized into the red zones (areas with five or more farm fires a day) and 582 are in the yellow zones (up to two farm fires a day).
"Villages that manage to eliminate stubble burning will be awarded prizes of Rs 50,000 (for those in yellow zone) and Rs 1 lakh (for red zone villages), said Darshan Singh, technical assistant at the agriculture department.
Setting ablaze paddy straw after harvesting is a decades-old method used by farmers in Punjab, Haryana and UP to ready their lands for the next crop season. Cheaper than most other methods, small-scale farmers often don't have the equipment needed to dispose of crop residues in alternative methods.
Over the past few years, state governments have offered equipment such as super seeders (machines that remove stubble) to farmers and cooperatives at subsidised rates.
For enforcement, teams of officials from the state pollution control board (HSPCB), revenue department, panchayat department, agriculture department and police have been constituted at the village-level to file complaints and issue challans against the farmers burning stubble.
There are also block-level and district-level enforcement teams, apart from mobile squads. Districts with a high incidence of farm fires also have control rooms for monitoring.
"Daily progress reports have been circulated by the agriculture department, which need to be submitted to the state level control room daily. There is micro-level planning ahead of the harvest season this year. The aim is to further reduce the number of farm fires and increase the area where there is no stubble burning," Singh said.
Separately, the Commission For Air Quality Management (CAQM) had last month directed the Punjab, Delhi, Haryana, Rajasthan and UP governments to submit daily action-taken reports from September 15 to November-end, the period that stubble burning typically lasts.
According to satellite imagery collected by Nasa and collated by the Indian Agriculture Research Institute, 3,661 active fire locations (AFL) were recorded in the 2022 kharif season in Haryana. The figures were almost double - 6,997 - in 2021, 4,202 in 2020 (pandemic year); 6,364 in 2019; and 9,225 in 2018.
Farmers say many of them were provided machines to remove stubble.
"Haryana had witnessed lower incidents of farm fires last year and this is likely to continue this time as well. Farmers have access to machines for harvesting. Also, many areas were flooded during the monsoon, because of which the paddy crops grown earlier failed," said Inderjit Singh, national vice-president of the All India Kisan Sabha