From Smoke to Solutions: Confronting the Stubble Burning Challenge🧑‍🌾🔥

With the winters Coming, farmers from Northern parts of India(mostly Punjab) begin preparation for wheat sowing resulting in stubble burning and smog formation, ultimately choking Delhi and the area nearby. Every year stubble burning becomes a topic of national interest.

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Let's deep dive into this.

What is stubble?
Non-edible parts like stem leaves and roots in the fields of rice are left after farmers are done harvesting the grain.

Problem
Farmers have less time to prepare for the next crop planting( usually wheat) so they use a harvester that leaves behind a lot of stubble. Moreover, the cost of harvesting by manual labor is very high. The only cheap and easiest solution left is to burn it.

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Impact

1. Pollution: Burning stubble releases toxic pollutants in the environment like carbon monoxide, methane, hydrocarbons, etc. These eventually affect air quality and people's health by forming smog(smoke+fog) and ultimately contributing to climate change
2. Health effects: 7.6 Cr is spent alone by people in rural Punjab to cure ailments due to stubble burning.
3. Heat penetration: Generates heat that penetrates into the soil causing decreased moisture, increasing soil erosion, and killing microorganisms.

You might be wondering that the issue here is the short window between harvesting and planting of new crops so why can't farmers sow the rice early?
It's not that feasible. Rice is a water-intensive crop so needs to be irrigated continuously which leads to a decrease in groundwater supply,to prevent this the government forces farmers to sow rice only after May 10th and transplant them after June 10th so that Monson season can be utilized well. This means ultimately we can do nothing about the window.

What are the solutions ahead?

1. Firstly we need to make farmers aware that it is not only causing pollution but also causing health hazards and deteriorating soil quality.
2. More research and development should be done on short-term varieties of rice, ultimately giving farmers the window period to remove stubble.
3. Ex-situ management of stubble should be done by carrying the stubble outside to convert it into specific products, manure, or electricity.
4. Recently the pusa bio decomposer was developed by the Indian Council of Agriculture Research, New Delhi It is a microbial solution that can convert residue into manure in 15 to 20 days.
5. Need to incentivize the sale of fodder from harvested paddy.
6. Subsidies should be given on super seeder machines that can uproot the crop residue and turn it into manure. Haryana is already taking the lead in this.

India already overproduces rice and wheat right now. We should shift our focus to the production of other crops that don't produce this much stubble. No doubt it's a long journey but by making farmers aware and with government efforts, the problem can be reduced.

Let me know, what you guys think of it💜
Till then, goodbye💫

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