“It’s okay to start fires after 5pm, isn’t it?” a young farmer asked gingerly. It was evening in a village in Amritsar district, and a nearby field had just been set ablaze. The glow of the fire lighting up his face, the youth added: “There’s leftover stubble in my farm and I don’t know what to do with it.”During a tour of several districts across Punjab, this reporter found that many farmers, farm union representatives and agriculture department officials seemed aware that fires lit in the evening went undetected by satellites. And although only a small fraction of farmers in the state appeared to have set fields on fire so far this season, most of the blazes detected by TOI during a three-day tour were in the evening hours.According to reports, including a study by NGO iFOREST last year, Indian agencies use data from US satellites to calculate active fire counts. These polar-orbiting satellites pass over India at 10.30am, 1.30pm and 1.30am, leaving a 12-hour window during which no observations are made.As with the young farmer in Amritsar district, many in Punjab appeared to believe that satellites were being used to catch individual farmers in the act of burning stubble. Manjit Singh Rai, president of farmers’ union BKU Doaba, used this perception to make a point: “Satellites catch a farmer when he is burning stubble but when hail destroys his crops, these satellites go blind.”There appears to be another reason why many crop fires are lit after 5pm. “Evening is when the chances of a farmer being fined for stubble-burning are low, since most officials have left for home by then,” said an agriculture department official in Jalandhar district, requesting anonymity.Together, these two factors appear to be pushing most burning incidents into a narrow evening window. According to several people in the field, this trend has been evident for the past two-three years. Clearly, the word has been going around for some time now.“In many instances, the village sarpanch tells farmers that if they have to burn stubble, they should do it quietly in the evening,” said Punjab Kisan Mazdoor Sangharsh Committee office-bearer Sarwan Singh Pandher.Pandher said farm fires had decreased significantly. “We can feel this in the air here. At any rate, stubble-burning is an issue that concerns Punjab, not Delhi. There are many local pollution sources in and around Delhi that cause a dip in air quality there. Stubble-burning has little impact on it,” the farm activist added.
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