📰 Proceed with caution
A National Register of Citizens exercise in Tripura would open a Pandora’s box
•The clamour for compilation of the National Register of Citizens (NRC) in Tripura reflects a real problem but also exposes deep demographic fault lines in the north-eastern State bordering Bangladesh. An NRC exercise in Tripura may open a Pandora’s box as India is still undecided on determination of citizenship status of lakhs of refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan.
•The Supreme Court has tagged a petition filed by the Tripura People’s Front seeking updating of the NRC in Tripura, along with the Assam NRC case, and issued a notice to the Centre. The petitioners have sought July 19, 1948 as the cut-off date in accordance with Article 6 of the Constitution. Tripura was a princely state prior to its merger with India on October 15, 1949. The Dasarath Deb-led Left Front government in Tripura signed an accord with the erstwhile militant outfit All Tripura Tribal Force (ATTF) in 1993 to send back all Bangladeshi nationals who came to the State after March 25, 1971 and were not in possession of valid documents.
•Successive Census Reports and official records show how large-scale migrationof people from erstwhile East Bengal and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) changed the demography of Tripura, stoking fears among various ethnic communities, the original inhabitants, about their survival. They were apprehensive that their identity, language, culture and traditions were at stake. Prior to the 1951 Census, ethnic communities enlisted as Scheduled Tribes constituted the majority population in Tripura, and accounted for 52.89% of the total population of 1.73 lakh in 1901. However, the percentage declined to 50.09 in 1941, 36.89 in 1951, to 28.95 in 1971 and 28.44 in 1981. It was 31.78% of the total population of 36.74 lakh recorded in the 2011 Census.
Steady influx
•A booklet titled, “Special Information Relating to the Influx of Refugees from East Bengal into India till 30th September, 1971”, brought out by the Department of Rehabilitation, Ministry of Labour and Rehabilitation, Government of India on October 15, 1971 states that there was influx of an estimated 5.17 lakh refugees from erstwhile East Pakistan into Tripura between 1947 and February 1971. Of them 3.74 lakh migrated between August 15, 1947 and March 31, 1958 following Partition and 1.43 lakh migrated between January 1, 1964 and March 24, 1971 due to communal riots in East Pakistan. Subsequently, Tripura recorded influx of 13.50 lakh refugees from March 25, 1971 to September 30, 1971 following the civil war and Pakistan Army atrocities in East Pakistan during the Bangladesh liberation war. About 8.52 lakh were sheltered in 230 refugee camps ,while 4.98 lakh took shelter outside the camps. The population of Tripura in 1971 was about 15.57 lakh, of whom 11.42 lakh were born in India and 3.95 lakh were born in erstwhile East Pakistan. The cut-off date for the NRC exercise will be critical to determination of citizenship of the East Pakistan refugees besides ensuring that the demographic fault lines do not give fresh ground for insurgency and a fresh conflict between ethnic communities and the migrants. Tripura has left behind a bitter past to move ahead.
•In Assam, the NRC has been updated by taking midnight of March 24, 1971 as the cut-off date in accordance with the Assam Accord, but the Supreme Court is also hearing a petition seeking 1951 as the cut-off year for identification of foreigners in the State. Of the 3.29 crore applicants in Assam, about 40 lakh were excluded from the complete draft of the updated NRC prepared under the Supreme Court-monitored exercise.
Constitutional guarantee
•Article 6 of the Constitution implies that a migrant from erstwhile East Pakistan is deemed to be an Indian citizen if either of his or her parents or any of his or her grandparents were born in India and in the case where such a person has migrated on or after July 19, 1948, and has been resident in the territory of India since the date of his migration. The migrant can also be deemed a citizen if such a person migrated on or after July 19, 1948 but has been registered as a citizen of India by an officer appointed by the Government of India. Many of those excluded in the NRC draft in Assam are post-Partition refugees and came to Assam prior to March 25, 1971 but reportedly do not have the required documents to prove their residency in India.
•Before any concrete plan on the NRC exercise is firmed up, the BJP-led governments at the Centre and in Tripura may push the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, 2016 to woo the post-Partition Bengali refugees by playing upon the perceived fear among them of being reduced to non-citizens if July 19, 1948 is taken as the cut-off date. The bill seeks to grant citizenship to six non-Muslim minority communities in Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan — Hindus, Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, Jains and Parsis. The BJP National Executive and its Assam State unit have been pushing the Bill, notwithstanding strong opposition in Assam and other northeastern States. With both the Centre and the Tripura government remaining non-committal on the NRC in Tripura, it indicates such a possibility.
•The deep demographic fault lines and the history of a bitter insurgency-ravaged past should, however, remind both New Delhi and Agartala that mishandling of the citizenship issue may push Tripura into a protracted conflict situation that will be difficult to resolve.
📰 Touching base: On PM Modi's visit to Japan
PM Modi’s visit to Japan should clarify the shared reading of a changing world order
•Ever since they institutionalised annual summit-level meetings in 2006, India and Japan have held a closely aligned world-view. Prime Minister Narendra Modi now heads to Japan for meetings with his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe, and they are expected to take stock of all the challenges they face, notably with regard to the U.S. and China. President Donald Trump’s recent actions on trade tariffs, sanctions against Iran and Russia, as well as the U.S.’s exit from several multilateral and security regimes are impacting both countries in different ways. For India, the impact is more direct, as the economy has been hurt by new American tariffs, review of its GSP (trading) status, and restrictions on visas for professionals. Moreover, possible U.S. sanctions over Indian engagement with Iran as well as defence purchases from Russia pose a looming challenge. For Japan too, U.S. trade tariffs are a concern and Washington’s exit from the Trans-Pacific Partnership is corralling Southeast Asian countries into a free trade regime under Chinese domination. In addition, the U.S.’s on-again, off-again nuclear negotiations with North Korea are keeping Tokyo on tenterhooks. India and Japan must closely cooperate on how to manage these challenges from the U.S. while maintaining their growing security ties with Washington, as members of the trilateral and quadrilateral formations in the Indo-Pacific. The other common concern is managing an increasingly influential China. Mr. Abe will meet Mr. Modi a day after he returns from a visit to Beijing, the first by a Japanese Prime Minister in seven years. Mr. Modi has re-engaged Beijing through multiple meetings with President Xi Jinping this year. The Prime Ministers are bound to compare notes on the way forward with their common neighbour, especially on building and financing alternatives to China’s Belt and Road projects for countries along the “Asia-Africa growth corridor”.
•On the bilateral front, there are several loose ends that Mr. Modi and Mr. Abe will work to tie up. The Shinkansen bullet train project has gathered speed, with the Japan International Cooperation Agency releasing the first tranche of ₹5,500 crore recently. But it could still run into delays over land acquisition issues. India and Japan have stepped up military exchanges, and will begin negotiations on a landmark acquisition and cross-servicing logistics agreement. However, there has been little movement on the pending purchase of ShinMaywa US-2 amphibian aircraft. And while Japanese investment has grown several-fold in India, trade figures are lower than levels five years ago. None of these issues is insurmountable, and the larger concerns of how to navigate uncharted and stormy geopolitical terrain, while maintaining strong positions on the international rules-based order, are likely to dominate Mr. Modi’s visit.
📰 China, Japan pivot to new markets to counter trade-war headwinds
The meeting between the two leaders was followed by the signing of a slew of agreements.
•Faced with the threat of a trade war with the United States, China and Japanhave decided to work together to develop new overseas markets, by focusing on collaboration instead of competing with each other.
•“Turning to cooperation from competition, the relationship between the two nations is entering a new stage,” Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe said a joint press conference with his Chinese counterpart Li Keqiang on Friday.
•Prime Minister Li endorsed how ties between the two countries had pivoted from full-blown rivalry to growing partnership, especially over the last two years.
•Mr. Li spotlighted that “we (China and Japan) are cooperation partners to each other and not a threat, and we support each other for peaceful development”.
•In his brief remarks, the Japanese Prime Minister nailed that joint forays in third countries would now be one of the new templates of Tokyo-Beijing ties.
•“We have set up a new mechanism of cooperation between China and Japan in third party markets. Over 1000 business representatives from the two nations gathering and signing multiple cooperation documents is one good example,” he observed.
•Analysts say that the Japanese Prime Minister’s remarks showcase his “pragmatism,” notwithstanding his strong nationalistic instincts. “Despite being proud Japanese, I think Mr. Abe is also a very pragmatic politician,” Huang Jing, Dean of International and Regional Studies Center at the Beijing Language and Culture University told The Hindu.
•Japan’s Kyodo news agency is reporting that by bolstering investment in other countries, the governments of Asia's two biggest economies will aim to form a new model of economic cooperation between them.
•The meeting between the two leaders was followed by the signing of a slew of agreements, which covered energy cooperation, military confidence building measures in the East China Sea, infrastructure development and joint development of hi-end technology.
•Focusing on cutting-edge know-how, an agreement was signed to establish a discussion platform on hi-end technology and intellectual property. The Chinese side hopes that such a forum would help make-up possible shortages of U.S. components, in case the Beijing-Washington trade and technology war escalates.
•The two sides also signed an agreement on joint development of gas fields in the East China Sea—an initiative that was stalled in 2008, when tensions over islands, called Diaoyu by China and Senkaku by Japan, spiraled. A decision has also been taken to launch joint search and rescue missions in these waters.
•Analysts say that China seeks Japanese companies to participate in its Belt and Road projects, especially in the financial sphere, to counter allegations that Beijing is deliberately pursuing “debt trap” diplomacy as tool for exercising political control in developing countries. By entering into joint ventures, Japanese firms hope they can revive their flagging fortunes in new opportunity areas.
•The two countries also signed a bilateral currency swap dealt of $ 26.7 billion—around 10 times as larger than a previous agreement that has expired.
•Mr. Abe said that Japan and China agreed to work together to open a hotline as soon as possible. That would help avert accidental clashes at sea and in the air. He stressed that the East China Sea should become a "sea of peace, cooperation and friendship."
•On North Korea, the two leaders reiterated that denuclearisation of North Korea was necessary. Mr. Abe said that Tokyo and Beijing will “fulfill responsibilities” for peace and stability in East Asia.
📰 IAF gets first overhauled Sukhoi
Ojhar base a shot in the arm for refurbishing the aging warheads of the Air Force
•In a major step towards improving the availability rate of the backbone of the Indian Air Force (IAF) fighter fleet, the IAF’s Base Repair Depot (BRD), in Ojhar, Maharashtra has successfully overhauled a Su-30 MKI aircraft.
•The first overhauled aircraft was handed over to Air Marshal HS Arora, Air Officer Commanding-in-Chief of South Western Air Command in a ceremony at Air Force Station, Ojhar on Friday.
•“Earlier, the first Su-30 MKI overhauled by this depot successfully took off on April 24 and has been flight tested for its airworthiness, before inducting it for operational tasks at a flying squadron,” IAF said in a statement.
•The statement added that 11 BRD is the only fighter aircraft repair depot of the force and undertakes repair and overhaul of frontline fighters such as MIG-29 and Sukhoi-30 MKI.
•The Su-30MKI procured from Russia and licence manufactured by Hindustan Aeronautics Limited (HAL) is the mainstay of the IAF’s fighter squadron. India has contracted 272 aircraft of which over 240 have been inducted into service.
•However, the availability rate of the Sukhoi fleet has been below 50% for a long time and over the last couple of years it has gone up close to 60% by various measures like local stocking of spares.
•Indigenous overhauling in-house within the IAF, will significantly reduce the time and improve the availability rate of the overall fleet at a time when the service is a facing a drop in its fighter squadron strength.
📰 Migratory birds start arriving at Chilika, numbers are down
Winged visitors likely to increase once the mudflats below the lake are exposed
•Migratory birds have started arriving at the wetlands of Odisha’s Chilika Lake — one of the largest wintering grounds in Asia, but not in their usual numbers this year.
•The arrival of migratory birds is awaited with the onset of winter every year. This year, however, fewer winged visitors have descended on the mudflats of the lake.
•“Around this time, Chilika is usually filled with a cacophony of birds. As acres of patches are still under water, birds are not descending on the lake,” said Susanta Nanda, chief executive of the Chilika Development Authority.
•Close to one million birds congregate on the mudflats of the lake during winter. The lake, spread over 1,000 sq km, is home to 230 bird species, out of which 97 are intercontinental migrants from the Artic and Eurasian regions.
•The lake has been a designated Ramsar site (a wetland of international importance) since 1981.
Rain-induced flooding
•The Nalabana Bird Sanctuary and Mangalajodi, the two major places where the birds congregate, also have not received the usual numbers. “Many migratory birds are flying in v-shape over Chilika and assessing the situation. Once the mudflats are exposed, birds will descend in lakhs,” said Mr. Nanda.
•One of the reasons behind the low turnout is the flooding after incessant rain triggered by cyclone Titli that hit the Odisha coast in the second week of October.
📰 Punjab’s burning problem
Farmers in Punjab continue to burn paddy stubble every winter despite a ban on the practice. Jacob Koshy and Vikas Vasudeva report on the compulsions that drive farmers to adopt this method of clearing their fields and the efforts by the State administration to wean them off it
•The highway to Bibipur, a hamlet about 50 km from Patiala town, cuts through acres of paddy. Some of the rice stalk are still a couple of feet high and green but many fields have taken on the distinctive yellow of straw that is ready to be harvested. About 200 km northwest of Patiala, in Amritsar — from where the monsoon winds recede earlier — the fields have already been harvested and readied for the winter crop. In Patiala, this step is still some time away, as the fires attest. Flaming carpets belch white smoke into the clear blue sky along this stretch of highway.
•Until October 14, 321 cases of fires were recorded in Amritsar. In contrast, there were only 81 in Patiala, according to the Punjab Remote Sensing Centre, Ludhiana, which tracks such fires via satellites and reports them to the government. Punjab alone generates about 20 million tonnes of straw, three-quarters of which are burnt. Behind the generation of such a huge volume of chaff is the increasing popularity of combine harvesters. Farmers prefer these machines as it helps them save on the high labour costs of manual harvesting. But one advantage of manual harvesting is that the stalk which remains is extremely small and does not impede the sowing of fresh seed. But the machines leave stubble shavings that are 6-8 inches high, which if not cleared make fresh sowing impossible.
•There are just two things needed for the quickest and the cheapest way to get rid of this stubble: diesel and a match box. Not surprisingly, setting the stubble on fire to prepare the fields for wheat has become a common practice in Punjab. Until a few decades ago, the straw generated by the machines was manageable. They could be sold to the packaging industry and also turned into mulch within the field through the natural, slow process of organic decomposition. Now, however, with about 20 million tonnes of straw generated in the State, and barely two to three weeks to dispose them of and prepare the fields for the next crop, cost-conscious farmers are left with few options other than burning the whole lot.
•For about a decade now, the Delhi administration has been complaining about this practice, holding it responsible for the abysmal air quality in the capital in winter. In 2013, the National Green Tribunal issued a directive to Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh asking them to ban such stubble burning. The environment ministers of these States as well as top officials at the Centre declared a “zero tolerance” policy on the burning of stubble, which has been estimated to contribute anywhere from 7% to 78% of the particulate matter-emission load in Delhi during winter.
•Since then, farmers in these States, particularly in Punjab, have been at the receiving end of an arsenal of measures which have ranged from persuasion to threats, incentives and entreaties, aimed at dissuading them from the practice.
Are machines the answer?
•In Bibipur, on an early October evening, a group of farmers have gathered at the village council office, a single-storey structure with a corrugated metal roof. In the building’s porch are what the State (and Central) government consider to be the instruments of emancipation: a ‘Happy Seeder’ machine, a paddy straw chopper and a super straw management system.
•Broadly, they are a family of hulking, mechanical attachments hitched to tractors. Between them, they can cut the rice straw, chop it finely, and strew it in the field so that over time it decomposes into mulch and becomes organic manure. The ‘Happy Seeder’, in particular, allows the rice straw to be cut, new seed (wheat, in the case of Punjab) to be sown, and the residual chaff to be strewn.
•Seeders and choppers have a long history in India. Inspired by the design and make of similar implements in fields in the U.S. and Australia, they cost ₹1-2 lakh a piece.
•Until 2016, Gurubans Singh, who is Bibipur’s biggest farmer with 70 acres of land, was not convinced about the benefits of mechanised harvesting. Singh, who worked as a senior official in the State excise department, returned to farming post-retirement, leasing out portions of his land to tenants. “We have been hearing about the harmful effects of stubble burning for some years now. But there were few practical alternatives,” he says.
•This year, Singh says, he was convinced by an environmental engineer at the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB) to try out the machines. Further, there was a new scheme, funded by both the State and Central governments, to defray the expense of buying these machines.
•Earlier this year, the Union Agriculture Ministry earmarked ₹591 crore for disbursal to Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, the idea being to help farmers access these machines. Individual farmers could buy them at half their retail price; if bought through self-help groups, they got an 80% discount. In Bibipur, Singh and nine other farmers got together and formed such a group. The cost price of the equipment in the Bibipur council office yard is ₹10 lakh, but thanks to the government scheme, Singh and his associates bought it for ₹2 lakh.
•According to Hardeep Singh, a local farmer, there are about 800 households in Bibipur, and nearly 1,200 acres of paddy fields that are ripe for harvesting. “These machines, at best, can harvest 10 acres a day. There are just three to four machines available [for a variety of tasks such as cutting the straw, planting wheat, baling the straw] for all of us,” says Hardeep. That works out to 120 days for managing the fields. But farmers have barely two months — from mid-September to mid-November — to clear out the field. This year, delayed rains have shrunk that window further, and different regions in Punjab have different harvesting times in keeping with subtle weather differences. “In many cases there is no option but to burn because it’s quick and cheap,” says Hardeep.
•Given the narrow harvesting window, farmers who require the machines have to line up at the village office to rent them, at ₹150 per hour. These machines, now gleaming as they are fresh from the factories, will last about seven to eight years, during which they would lie idle for 11 months in a year. There are servicing costs as well. Sub-optimal machines could backfire and even reduce the yield of the wheat. Servicing and maintenance costs, however, are not included in the government subsidy.
•Even Singh, who is optimistic that farmers in his village would, “like him, whole-heartedly eschew stubble-burning” doesn’t expect it to happen this year. There also remains to be addressed the matter of inadequacies in the harvesters. For instance, the implements that Bibipur has procured are suitable for large tractors, whereas many farmers here only have smaller ones. This problem is prevalent in other villages too.
•In Rolu Majra, a village in Rupnagar, Ajaib Singh, 58, who has three acres of paddy, points out that to derive optimum results from the ‘Happy Seeder’ machine, a tractor with a capacity of 45-55 hp is required. “I have a tractor of only 35 hp. Tell me how can I use this machine in my field? The government is pushing these machines without realising that they are not viable for small and marginal farmers, and that they will only increase their straw management costs,” he says, adding that given the speed at which the ‘Happy Seeder’ machine operates, it would take several days to sow wheat as farmers in the village would have to use the machine turn by turn. This would mean that the farmers either have to lease bigger tractors to use these implements or procure customised implements that may cost them more. “Just one self-help group in a village is not adequate. What we hope is that by next year (the subsidised-implements scheme is expected to continue) there will be greater supply,” Ajaib says.
•According to government figures, there are around 1.85 million farming families in Punjab, of whom 65% are small and marginal farmers. Of the 5.03 million hectares of land in Punjab, around 4.23 million hectares are under cultivation. Patiala has about 270,000 hectares under cultivation, and in line with the rest of the State, follows a rice-wheat cropping pattern, with rice sown in July and harvested in October-November, while wheat is the winter crop harvested in March-April.
A routine practice
•About 100 km from Bibipur, in Ludhiana’s Rola village, a paddy field that is barely an acre, is on fire. Upendra, a daily wage labourer from Bihar, is navigating the periphery of the field with a thresher, pushing in stray clumps of straw into the flames to ensure they burn better. He says he is merely following instructions from his paymaster (a farmer whose name he does not know) for ₹300 a day.
•Sarabjit Singh, another farmer from Rola, says that for him, burning the paddy field after harvest is a “routine, annual practice”. He adds that in his village and for 50 others in the region, no machines have been made available nor have there been any awareness programmes on the harmful effects of burning.
•State government officials, however, claim that Punjab had disbursed about 8,000 farm implements to individual farmers and set up 4,795 custom hiring centres, from where such machinery could be leased. The cost of hiring these machines, according to Sarabjit, was ₹5,000 an acre, and setting the field alight only cost him a few litres of diesel. The per-acre costs also vary depending on the size of the landholding and the cost of fuel on a given day.
•This narrative, of many farmers being too poor to afford the machinery, is one that State pollution control board officials routinely encounter through the year.
•Until mid-October, the PPCB had levied ₹8,92,500 as fines — or ‘environmental compensation cess’ as it is officially called — on farmers burning paddy stubble. However, they have managed to collect only ₹3,05,000, according to PPCB figures.
•“The fines are collected over time. Often the farmers do not have the money to immediately pay these fines,” says Gulshan Rai, chief environmental engineer, PPCB. Another PPCB official, on condition of anonymity, says that they often do not enforce the fines as these work out to about ₹2,500 per acre. Officials say that satellite images alert them to fields set afire by farmers but actually confronting a guilty farmer is a complicated affair. “We get in touch with the patwari (who keeps land-ownership records) to identify the farmer concerned. Sometimes the farmers protest, sometimes they plead innocence, and sometimes poverty,” says the officer, who is tasked with following up on stubble burning incidents in Punjab.
•There is also the danger of violence. The cropping and harvesting seasons are highly stressful times for the farmers who have their hands full coping with uncertainties on the procurement and weather fronts. “There have been instances when our officials were gheraoed, or asked ‘why am I being punished, when you’ve let my neighbour get away’, and then there are the farmer unions backed by different political groups. These are complications that we face every year. This year is no different,” says another PPCB official.
•Jaspal Singh, another farmer from Ludhiana, says that rising diesel prices are another factor that farmers bear in mind when choosing between mechanised stubble harvesting and merely burning the field. “The machines consume about five litres of diesel per acre. If we grow potato, then about 20 litres. The cost for potato is higher because it is not possible to deploy a ‘Happy Seeder’, which is only equipped to thresh rice-straw and sow wheat. In other words, other instruments, such as the mulcher plough, are needed to prepare the field for potato, which would add to the costs.”
•In Punjab and Haryana, there are restrictions in place on how much groundwater could be drawn, as farmers in these States like to flood their fields to sow the rice crop. This, according to Jaspal, has further narrowed the window to a mere two-three weeks for clearing out the rice stubble, forcing farmers like him to burn away the stubble.
The government line
•But officials from the PPCB insist that enforcement of the stubble-burning ban has been stepped up, and so far, there have been fewer fires this year when compared to the same time frame last year. From September 21 to October 21 this year, there were 2,589 cases of stubble fire in the State compared to 7,613 such cases during the corresponding period last year.
•There has also been independent confirmation (though relying on the same satellites) of this decline from Hiren Jethva, a U.S.-based researcher at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)-affiliated Universities Space Research Association. Jethva’s analysis of crop fires in Punjab and Haryana between October 1 and October 22 suggests that there were 12,194 instances of fires in 2017 and only 5,893 this year. There had been 16,275 of these in 2016.
•For Krunesh Garg, Member Secretary, PPCB, this is a sign that government intervention is working. “We have scaled up several measures this year. Now the crop residue is also being used for seven biomass-based power projects with a combined capacity of 62.5 MW,” he said at a recent media briefing. “We are educating farmers that burning the soil also destroys the soil nutrients and increases their fertilizer requirement. We have run advertisements. Using farm equipment is only slightly costlier, just ₹300 more per acre, than burning the field, and it helps preserve the environment as well as their health.”
•Apart from efforts to motivate farmers to sell their field residue to power generation companies, the administration is also trying to build a narrative on how stubble-burning damages the soil.
•According to Punjab’s Additional Chief Secretary (development), Viswajeet Khanna, burning a tonne of paddy straw leads to the soil losing about 5.5 kg of nitrogen, 2.3 kg of phosphorus, 25 kg of potassium, 1.2 kg sulphur, and 400 kg of organic matter, besides causing the death of useful microbial population. Currently, about 4.30 million tonnes of paddy (21.82% of the total paddy straw generated) is being consumed by various stakeholders, as opposed to being burnt in the fields.
•Pointing out that mechanisation is not the sole answer to the problem of stubble burning, Umendra Dutt of Kheti Virasat Mission, an organisation promoting organic farming, says that “mechanisation is only a partial solution, since most of these machines would be used for just a month and lie idle for the rest of the year. Instead, farmers should be motivated to diversify their crops, focussing on domestic diversification and not just commercial diversification.”
•Yet, even the most optimistic of pollution board authorities, be it in Punjab or Delhi, is not expecting instances of stubble-burning to drop down to zero. In his briefing a fortnight ago, Garg said that 80,879 fire incidents were detected during the season in 2016, and 43,660 in 2017. “This year, we expect a 50% reduction,” he said. This is roughly in line with the reduction last year. Garg also contends — and this is a widely prevalent view among farmers in Punjab as well as among other PPCB officials — that the pollution from stubble-burning in Punjab contributes minimally to Delhi’s pollution. “We frequently see that air pollution remains low in Punjab but becomes very high in Delhi. Surely, if stubble-burning is a major factor, would not that be reflected here too?” he asks.
•While studies over the years have established that pollutants can travel great distances and survive in the atmosphere for a long time, the contribution of Punjab’s stubble-burning to Delhi’s winter smog has not been precisely determined. A Harvard University study published in March 2018 said that “7-78%” of PM2.5 pollution in Delhi is due to “agricultural fires”.
