Enveloped in thick blanket of smog, villages across Punjab gasp for breath

It is 1.30 pm in the remote village of Lang in Patiala where residents are finding it hard to breathe as smog has enveloped the area for the past three days. Ash-like matter has settled on cars parked in the open, indicating the quality of air that village residents breathe in.

A little further on the outskirts of another village — Raungla — a motley group of young men continues to play cricket but every few minutes, the batter and the bowler stop for a breather given the smog that engulfs their village. “We play every Sunday but today it feels suffocated,” says one of them.

As Punjab, like other states, is ill-equipped to monitor real-time air quality in villages, villagers bear the brunt of thick smog for days. Farmers and their families are the first ones to suffer due to the thick blanket of smoke that emanates from burning fields.

“Sometimes due to low air current, smoke mixed with fog surrounds villages for days,” said a senior official.

“We live in smoggy conditions for almost a fortnight every year when stubble is set on fire. For the past two years, my family has not burnt stubble on our land as I saw my grandfather and mother coughing for over a month in 2023,” said Harjit Singh, a farmer of Baran village. “We need to stop this practice and save our children and elders from health complications. What will we do with any extra income from paddy when our elderly and younger ones suffer due to pollution,” said Harjit, a postgraduate in history.

“Thick smog has engulfed our village for almost a week. The conditions are worse during mornings and evenings. The sun is hardly visible. While the winter is yet to set in even though it is the last week of October, mosquitoes continue to spread dengue,” says Bhalwinder Singh, a landlord from Samana.

An increasing number of elderly persons and children from villages are nowadays visiting doctors, complaining of sore throat, fever, irritation in eyes and other ailments. “While the air quality in urban areas has deteriorated significantly, it is the rural Punjab which is the worst hit due to a high concentration of PM10 particles. Cases of sore throat and fever have gone up in the past 10 days,” said a doctor deputed in a rural health facility.

With the short time window between paddy harvesting and wheat sowing — roughly three weeks — a key reason why farmers resort to stubble burning, Punjab on Sunday saw over 122 farm fire cases — the highest this season.

Interestingly, while farm fires take place in villages, the air quality index is measured only in big cities of the state. At present, the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB) has no mechanism to obtain real-time data on air quality in villages. Continuous Ambient Air Quality Monitoring Stations help the PPCB assess real-time air quality. Any such station requires an investment of Rs 1 crore — Rs 80 lakh installation charges and Rs 20 to 25 lakh running expenditure.

“We have some manual stations too in certain pockets, including villages, which give manual reading. However, up-to-date real-time monitoring is not possible in every village given the cost complications,” said a senior PPCB official.

On October 26, Punjab saw 122 fresh farm fire cases as compared to 108 and 589 cases in 2024 and 2023, respectively. This year so far, the state has recorded 743 cases as compared to 1,857 last year.