Addressing an anomaly: On stubble burning, burnt-area estimates.
The Centre must make burnt-area estimates of stubble public.
In a statement to Parliament, the Environment Ministry said that Punjab and Haryana had collectively reduced “fire incidences” by 90% in 2025 compared to 2022. This is in reference to the burning of farm stubble, a traditional shortcut to quickly shed fields of paddy remnants and prepare them for a second crop — in this case, wheat — but that has in the last decade and a half been linked to spikes in air pollution in October-November in Delhi and surrounding cities.
As part of steps to address this, the Centre and the State governments have been employing a carrot-and-stick approach — fining farmers but, simultaneously, also providing subsidised farm equipment, combine harvesters and tr actors as well as incentivising them to collect stubble and sell them to thermal plants for co-firing. There is little direct evidence to show that these measures have reduced the contribution of stubble burning to Delhi’s post-monsoon air quality. That would require using mass-spectrograph measures to analyse the chemical make-up of pollutants over time and trace the weightage of stubble burning. That analysis is unavailable and so the government has been using proxies such as counting whether the number of active fires visible by satellites have been declining to evaluate this metric. Since 2020 there has been a decline in fires in Punjab and Haryana, prompting the government to take credit. It turns out that this was a pyrrhic victory. When images from a different satellite were used to compute another parameter called ‘burnt area’ — the actual land area that had been burned — the reduction was a more gradual 30%: from about 31,500 square kilometres in 2022 to 19,700 sq.km in 2025 (as of November 25, this year), an independent research outfit has found. Using data from another set of satellites called Meteosat, unambiguous evidence emerged that farm fires had shifted towards the evening. Unlike the other satellites, which orbit the poles, this one is ‘geostationary’, meaning it continuously looks at the same spot. The Centre has been using fire count-reduction based on polar-satellite data, which passes through India between 10 a.m. and 1.30 p.m. Since 2022, reports had been emerging that farmers had shifted their burning towards evening precisely to avoid detection by these satellites. The Supreme Court of India, when apprised of this in 2024, had expressly told Environment Ministry bodies to ascertain ‘burnt area’ to gauge stubble burning trends. Moreover, given that satellites have different resolution powers, there is no knowing what the true count of fires is at present. The Centre, however, has still not made year-wise burnt-area estimates public. Being disingenuous with data will only accelerate the erosion of public confidence in the government’s claim on tackling air pollution. The Centre must immediately move to address this.