Opinion Express View | AAP Govt in Punjab watches the fields burn. The solution is reducing paddy acreage & deep agri reforms
Punjab needs to sharply reduce, maybe halve, its three million hectares-plus area now under paddy cultivation. It simply does not have the water resources for this.
The AAP government in Punjab has demonstrated both incompetence and lack of political will in taking any action against perpetrators. 
Punjab has recorded 29,400 paddy crop residue burning events in the current harvest season from September 15 to November 5, as against 28,792 during the same period last year. The increase cannot be blamed on the absence of farmer awareness or means to manage the leftover stubble and straw from combine-harvesting. The state has some 50,000 tractor-drawn happy, super and smart seeders that can remove the standing paddy stubble and incorporate it into the soil, while simultaneously sowing the seeds of the next wheat crop. These — along with an equal number of other machines (mulchers, rotavators, straw balers, choppers, reversible mould board ploughs, etc) — should, at least on paper, enable a significant part of Punjab’s wheat area to be planted without setting fields on fire. That’s not happening. A ground report in this newspaper has shown even farmers having access to the machines taking the easy way out, unmindful of the public health costs.
There’s an obvious reason why farmers are continuing to do what they shouldn’t be. The AAP government in Punjab has demonstrated both incompetence and lack of political will in taking any action against perpetrators — not a single FIR has been filed so far. True, the extended monsoon has delayed paddy harvesting by around 10 days this time, further reducing the sowing window for wheat. But given the availability of machines — the seeders, costing Rs 1.75-2.5 lakh each, are subsidised up to 80 per cent — this shouldn’t have been a serious constraint. The likelihood of a spike in residue burning incidents due to late harvesting is something that was known and could have been managed. Such proactiveness was expected all the more from a party that’s also in power in Delhi, the state bearing the brunt of the farm fires.
Clearly, machines cannot, beyond a point, solve what is more than just a burning problem. Punjab needs to sharply reduce, maybe halve, its three million hectares-plus area now under paddy cultivation. It simply does not have the water resources for this. As a first step, the supply of free electricity, encouraging farmers to pump excess groundwater to grow a crop not best suited to the state’s agro-ecology, must end. This should be accompanied by a planned programme — say, over five years — of diverting half of the paddy area to cotton, maize, soyabean, arhar and other kharif pulses and oilseeds. Farmers growing these alternative crops may be given assurance of minimum support price (MSP) that will incentivise them to switch from paddy. Such guaranteed MSPs, conditional upon their not cultivating paddy and paid as difference over the ruling market prices, can be a realistic solution to a problem rooted as much in political economy as agronomy.
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