Winter is coming, and every single soul in Delhi is worried about the air we continue to breathe. Coupled with the toxic water River Yamuna holds within, life is sustaining with greater difficulty in the capital’s territory and nearby.
This happens because of multiple factors working like spiraling-in western disturbances, air pollution through bursting crackers, burning crop residue (parali) etc. in tandem, composing a bigger threat in reality.
Consequently, the city’s air quality index (AQI) touches beyond 400 which entails a severe category threat to anyone who takes in the toxic air.
The Environment Minister of Delhi has therefore, asked for an “emergency” meeting consisting of states in its vicinity: Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh.
Mr. Gopal Rai said: “I have written a letter to the Union environment minister, seeking an emergency meeting over the pollution situation”.
“We cannot get rid of pollution in Delhi unless and until immediate as well as long-term steps are implemented in the neighboring states to curb ‘parali’ burning”.
Burning of the residue attracts a penalty under Section 188 of the Indian Penal Code as well as under the Air (Prevention and Control of Pollution) Act,1981 but the law certainly lacks teeth and intentional lack of mere implementation.
The aim of such a meeting will be to come-up with a permanent solution to the perennial issue of paddy burning and the severe air pollution that engulfs the national capital.
What is this stubble burning and why farmers prefer this method?
While the manual harvesting of crops doesn’t leave any residue behind, but when harvesting is done with the help of combine harvester, straws remain in the field.
Wheat, paddy and sugarcane heaps are normally burnt open in the air. Based on the data from an official report, every year sees more than 500 million tonnes of parali (crop residues) burning in the country.
About 70 per cent of this comes from cereal crops like rice, maize, wheat and millets. Of this, approximately 34 per cent comes from rice and 22 per cent gets produced from wheat crops.
There exist a variety of options to remove these, i.e., using Happy Seeder, directing the stubble to alternative energy production units etc. but the farmers, mostly negligent and insensitive towards the environmental issues prefer to burn it.
This happens because farmers need to prepare their lands for the next crop and this is seemingly the most economical, easy and fast method to achieve the above.
A Farmer explains: “Due to this, paddy harvesting has been extended to the end of October. The farmers then in haste to sow wheat crop, which is ideally sown by mid-November, found it easy to burn stubble in order to clear fields for the next crop”.
Also, in times there are lands being prepared everywhere, large scale farmers harvesting their lands on every side, it becomes difficult for every farmer to get his/her hands on the Happy seeder, that helps dealing with the stubble.
All this exists despite the Union government’s directed expenditure of over Rs 2,000 crore since last four years just to tackle stubble burning.
Still the stubble burning cases are going high, with an average rate of 5000 cases per day and in total, crossing the threshold to reach 35000 cases this year.
62% of these belonged to Punjab.
What’s the matter with this burning?
If we are to believe a study, it successfully estimates different toxins released in the air while burning stubble every year during the season.
These are 149.24 million tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2), 0.25 million tonnes oxides of Sulphur (SOX), 9 million tonnes carbon monoxide (CO), 0.07 million tonnes of black carbon, 1.28 million tonnes of particulate matter that settle in our lungs and cause breathing problems.
All these, in long term, can destabilize the whole Tibetan plateau that is known to play critical role in shifting the ITCZ (Inter-tropical Convergence Zone, the belt of low-pressure sustaining Earth’s trade winds) and triggering even the Indian Monsoon.
In addition to bare understanding of the harmfulness attributed to this direct release of poison in air, this heat can reach 1 centimeter deep into the soil, changing properties and compositions killing the organisms working on the fertility of soil, elevating the temperatures from 33.8 to 42.2 degree Celsius.
This burning not only adds something to air but is also held responsible for a loss of essential soil nutrients like Nitrogen by about 5.5 kgs, phosphorus by 2.3 kgs, 25 kg potassium and even more than a kg of Sulphur.
What is wrong with the availability of subsidized machines for handling the stubble?
This year, the subsidy of Rs. 261 has been given to provide helping machines for 25,811 farmers. Of these, nearly 10,025 farmers have already booked these machines for which Rs. 200 crore of the authorized amount have been allotted.
Apart from the Happy Seeder mentioned above, the following machines can be used to efficiently remove paddy straw from the fields:
- Rotavator known to incorporate crop stubble in the soil.
- Zero till seed drill used to directly sow the seeds in the presence of previous crop stubble.
- Baler collects stubble and make its bundles.
- Paddy Straw Chopper for cutting the paddy straw and easy mixing with the soil.
- Reaper Binder for harvesting paddy straw.
For an individual farmer, this subsidy is 50% and if purchased in a group, the subsidy goes as high as 80%.
This is good but then why the issue persists.
“It can’t work because the majority of farmers in Punjab are marginal and small. Their financial condition is poor. They are not in a position to buy crop residue machines even on subsidy. Moreover, to run this machine, one needs a bigger tractor costing 7-8 lakh”.
But big farmers in the state successfully enjoy all the benefits and subsidies, on the basis of their relations with agricultural officers and machine manufacturers.
They are otherwise supposed to undertake this practice in question without subsidy. This act of injustice leaves a majority of small and marginal farmers to take law into their hands.
The conventional solutions, be it subsidies or penalties, seem to have failed the very purpose of coaxing the farmers to give up this habit. They need a better motivating reason and we have ‘a chink of hope’ in ‘the armor of ignorance’.
Newer alternatives for an older problem:
Regenerative Agriculture, restructuring Ecosystems:
Since last few years, a group of farmers near Delhi have begun selling their wasted crop residue back to be used in soil.
Its life yielding organic content consisting of carbon and other nutrients can rejuvenate the lost soil richness instead of being released into the atmosphere, smothering lives and killing the planet.
This stabilizes all the prospects: dwindling food security, increasing demand with increasing population for now and the issue of air pollution in NCT Delhi.
A member of Urban Farms Company explains: “We believe what is typically thought of as waste can be converted into high quality farm inputs. Through buying nearly a thousand tonnes of paddy stubble each year, we have been able to prevent 500 acres of fields from being burned.”
The global food systems account for a third of all greenhouse gas emissions while in India, food systems are responsible for around 20% of all emissions:
“The largest contribution came from agriculture and land use/land-use change activities (71%), remaining were from supply chain activities: retail, transport, consumption, fuel production, waste management, industrial processes and packaging”, according to a study published in Nature.
With Climate change and increasing heat stress, uncertain rainfall, floods and erosion may be enough to undo the effectiveness and achievements made under the banner of green revolution.
Those were difficult times, India had barely nothing to survive on. America’s PL480 food grains were a mess and a string of wars with neighboring Nations composed most of India’s crisis.
With the advancement of technology in the understanding of Nature and its intricacies, humans have gained an upper hand in making things right.
We know how we can create better fuels, better mobility, improve life systems, adopt alternatives very easily like rhizobium use for Nitrogen fixation etc. instead of Fertilizers.
This in fact, facilitates natural nutrient cycling and even moisture retaining capacity of the soil, allowing various microorganisms to continue to survive in their natural habitats, the soil with lesser chemicals.
“The Urban Farms Co hubs have processes like nurseries, seeds, farm services, equipment for members to rent, and demo plots for education”.
It therefore, takes risk with Farmers involved with them, only recovering the costs once farmers begin to make classified profits, being lucrative enough for the needy farmers too.
Ecological security alone is not an answer enough to the environmental problems. They need to provide a social backing to such perils too, for long term sustainability and long-lasting solutions.