“It’s okay to start fires after 5pm, isn’t it?” a young farmer asked gingerly. The glow of the fire lighting up his face, the youth added: “There’s leftover stubble in my farm and I don’t know what to do with it. ” It was evening in a village in Amritsar district, and a nearby field had just been set ablaze.
These polar-orbiting satellites pass over India at 10.30am, 1.30pm and 1.30am, leaving a 12-hour window during which no observations are made.
Including a study by NGO iFOREST last year, Indian agencies use data from US satellites to calculate active fire counts, according to reports. “Evening is when the chances of a farmer being fined for stubble-burning are low, since most officials have left for home by then,” said an agriculture department official in Jalandhar district, requesting anonymity. This trend has been evident for the past two-three years, according to several people in the field. “In many instances, the village sarpanch tells farmers that if they have to burn stubble, they should do it quietly in the evening,” said Punjab Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee office-bearer Sarwan Singh Pandher. Pandher said farm fires had decreased significantly.
As with the young farmer in Amritsar district, many in Punjab appeared to believe that satellites were being used to catch individual farmers in the act of burning stubble. Manjit Singh Rai, president of farmers’ union BKU Doaba, used this perception to make a point: “Satellites catch a farmer when he is burning stubble but when hail destroys his crops, these satellites go blind. There appears to be another reason why many crop fires are lit after 5pm. Together, these two factors appear to be pushing most burning incidents into a narrow evening window. Clearly, the word has been going around for some time now. “We can feel this in the air here. At any rate, stubble-burning is an issue that concerns Punjab, not Delhi. There are many local pollution sources in and around Delhi that cause a dip in air quality there. Stubble-burning has little impact on it,” the farm activist added.