Let farmers make hay and money too

Rajesh Ramachandran

INDIA is seriously seeking to host the Olympics in 2036, inviting the best athletes, coaches, managers and spectators from across the world. New Delhi is the obvious choice for such a mega event. Imagine Delhi hosting the Olympics in September-October when the city chokes. Early this week, Delhi had acquired the dubious distinction of being the most polluted city in the world; and while hosting an event like the Olympics, the city would be known forever as the place that made world-class athletes choke, or worse, become asthmatic for life. But the problem with Delhi’s pollution is that the Centre and the state governments pass on the blame to Punjab, located at least a couple of hundred kilometres away.

The Centre can consider a kisan paryavaran nidhi to make hay baler rentals free of cost and also to incentivise the sale of straw by the farmers.

While travelling on the Eastern Peripheral Expressway from Kundli to Noida a couple of days ago, one could see at least one blazing field as if it were some routine farming activity. All around Delhi, in Haryana and western UP pockets, fields are on fire — that is, wherever paddy was recently harvested. Even if farm fires contribute only 30 per cent (as recently reported) to Delhi’s polluted air, this ought to be managed first in Delhi’s neighbourhood. But then, if Delhi cannot mitigate 70 per cent of the sources of its pollution, why should it be concerned about the rest 30 per cent?

All the talk about farm fires begins and ends with the stubble-burning season. A lot of publicity is given to hundreds of crores of rupees spent on the farm equipment supplied to farmers and then data jugglery is done to claim that the current year’s fire incidents are less than the previous year’s. But that is it. Once the paddy harvest is over and the stubble is burned and then the wheat is sown, farm fires are forgotten. When the wheat stubble would be burned in April-May, summer would have set in, ensuring that the toxic gases are not trapped in the atmosphere. So, not much spin-doctoring is required to make claims about summer stubble burning.

But the fact remains that the governments sleep over the farm fire pollution till the paddy harvest every year. In case the harvest is early (before there is a nip in the air) and the wind speed is good, taking the smoke away from Delhi — add to it some rain as bonanza — nobody would even talk about farm fires that year. Well, all this needs to change not for the sake of Delhi, but primarily for the sake of farmers, their families and their neighbourhood in Punjab, Haryana, UP, Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. So long as these states tackle farm fires as some irritant for city slickers far away which brings them a bad name, the situation will never improve. Farm fires need to be tackled as a grievous health hazard for farmers in Haryana, Punjab and elsewhere.

Farmers, their unions, agriculture scientists, farm equipment experts, bureaucrats and politicians should first of all accept that all the solutions that they have proffered so far have failed. Small farmers do not have the money nor can they be convinced to buy the equipment, despite the subsidy, to plough the stubble back into the field. It is extra work of a doubtful nature, and there are no happy takers for those seeders and mulchers. And so far, of the 185 lakh tonnes of paddy straw produced in Punjab, just about 16 per cent is being used in Punjab’s 42 CNG units, 14 biomass plants and an ethanol unit. Haryana and other states do not even offer these figures or an alternative use for straw, reducing this issue to a law and order problem and lazily penalising the farmer. Last week, in Kurukshetra district alone, 215 farmers were fined.

What is going up in smoke is something that can be used in the paper and pulp industry, in cement-brick manufacturing, in bioethanol production and something that can simply replace coal as fuel. Yet, hundreds of lakhs of tonnes of this valuable input is being burned, proving that it is just one organisation that took India to the moon, while the rest of society remains unscientific and regressive, creating carcinogenic pollutants instead of prosperity. The primary blame lies with a system that has failed to turn farmers into agricultural and social entrepreneurs. The Central Government’s procurement regime and the meagre income it offers have lulled farmers into a false sense of security in the paddy-wheat cycle at the cost of their entrepreneurial energy and innovative spirit.

Instead of offering subsidy to buy machines that do the uneconomical work of ploughing the paddy stubble back into the fields, the governments should ensure that combine harvesters are rented only along with hay balers. And then the governments should buy the hay or straw from the farmer at the farmgate. When hay, too, fetches money along with the crop, it becomes valuable for the farmer. The Centre can consider a kisan paryavaran nidhi to make hay baler rentals free of cost and also to incentivise the sale of straw by the farmers.

In traditional rice-eating communities, hay was a very important byproduct of paddy farming as it was used as cattle fodder and also to make thatched roofs. A big bale of hay in the shape of a conical silo was always a sign of a prosperous agricultural household. And it is a shame that such a valuable byproduct is set on fire in a mechanical manner, severely affecting the soil nutrients and thereby reducing farm fertility.

And here is a cautionary tale for all those sturdy farmers from Attari to Agra who think nothing of stubble burning, who boast about their immunity. In this generation or the next, many of them will become dependent on antihistamines and asthma inhalers. And it is no joke to get choked on a whiff of a perfume or an agarbatti, for that is how a chronic patient ends up. 

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