The world was already in the VUCA phase with a lot of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. The war in Ukraine that started in the year 2022 added to these upheavals and impacted worldwide trade especially bringing volatile shifts in the food commodity market. Trade of wheat, maize, pulses and fertilizers were severely hit, leading to huge disruptions in the world food market between 2022 and 2024. The resulting inflation led the Indian Government to ban the export of rice.

Let us analyze how this geopolitical crisis in the Black sea region caused a cascading effect on the deteriorating air quality of Delhi-National Capital Region in the winter of 2024. Export-quality rice in India has been grown in areas that traditionally have never grown rice before, namely Punjab, Haryana, and Western UP. The Green Revolution in the north-western part of India led to the use of groundwater for irrigation which now grows the best quality of Basmati and other varieties of rice. The region accounts for more than 70 per cent of the export of the world’s Basmati rice.

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The neighbouring Punjab province of Pakistan also grows Basmati contributing to around 17 per cent of the world’s traded basmati. Several factors incite the crop residue burning in Punjab and other northern states during the harvest season in November to early December each year. Firstly, the stalk residue of the Basmati is long, with the 1121 Sella Basmati, the most preferred worldwide and widely grown in Punjab-Haryana, having the longest stalks. Known as PUSA hybrid 1121 ICAR variety, the residue of the harvested paddy has an average stalk size of 130 cm that is left on the fields after harvesting. This stalk is also harder to cut or uproot than traditional paddy post-harvest residue stalk. That means more labour and costs to remove the stalk residue.

The other reason for burning the stalk of the Basmati rice is because it is not good fodder unlike other nonBasmati rice varieties. The stalks are sharp and harder and therefore are not useful. Secondly, let’s not forget that for this part of India, the Rabi crop has always been the mainstay and gets primacy over other crops. The farmers would not want a very tight window of time to sow the Rabi crop. This means more labour efforts are needed in the fields of Punjab and Haryana to destalk the fields before November-December. It becomes easier, cost effective and quicker to burn the stubble so that the time between removing the stalk residue and the sowing of the Rabi crop is reduced.

Thirdly, farming in Punjab that had started to deploy migrant daily or contractual cheap labour coming from Bihar, Jharkhand, and Bengal since the late 1980s, felt the strain with most of this migrant labour not returning to Punjab-Haryana after the Covid pandemic. With the advent of better individual benefit schemes of almost all the State Governments and the Central Government, many of the traditional migrant labour has not returned to the fields of Punjab. So, burning crop residue becomes the least-effort option available for these farmers of Punjab. Fourthly, Basmati is a water intensive crop that demands a lot of ground water for irrigation. Due to the depleting levels of ground water over the past few years, the Government has imposed legal restrictions on the usage of groundwater for irrigation before the onset of monsoon.

This delays the sowing of Basmati crop which further squeezes the window for clearing the fields for the next Rabi crop. This further instigates farmers to burn the stalk residue as they have very little time left to clear their fields. Fifth, since these areas were also not traditionally rice-growing areas, the attack of pests and crop disease has been rampant. The increase in the use of pesticides has led to Punjab becoming the pesticide and fertilizer capital of the country in per hectare use (source: reply to Parliamentary Question by Union Agriculture Minister, Shivraj Chauhan).

The cost of these pesticides and fertilizers rose worldwide, with Russia, being the largest exporter, having to cut down exports due to sanctions. Without pesticides, the Punjab farmers were pushed to fall back on their traditional methods of crop burning to get rid of the pests in their harvested paddy fields. Many farmers still believe that burning replenishes the field nutrients and destroys pests. To prevent crop residue burning, the Government of India has introduced several measures ~ Crop Residue Management scheme, Agri-Infrastructure Fund, the National Clean Air Programme (NCAP) among others. However, as the classical story goes, the implements and equipment purchased from these programmes usually ends up in the hands of a few large farmers who corner most of the Governmental support and schemes.

The alternative ~ of deploying privately owned mechanized implements to uproot the long and hardy stalks of paddy crop residue ~ becomes cost prohibitive making the pricing of rice uncompetitive for the farmers. The medium and small farmers of Punjab, who were already reeling under the double whammy of rising costs in 2022- 24, were by and large bereft of Government Support programmes and didn’t get back their migrant labour. They were left with just one option, to burn the crop residue and the hardy stalks (study of Kurinji Kemanth, Ramandeep Singh and Sneha Maria Ignatious) in 2024. Added to this was the preference of the small and medium farmers of Punjab for growing the fast growing Pusa 44 variety of rice (despite the Government ban on it).

The PUSA 44 generates much higher stalk and quantity of residue, which again becomes a bane for the farmers of Punjab. Burning residue is the fastest and cheapest method. Realizing these challenges, the Government took several pre-emptive steps and interventions from early 2024. Results on the air quality in October 2024 showed remarkable results. According to the NASA VIIRS data, during the months of October and December 2024, Punjab showed considerable improvement with 75 per cent reduction in the incidents of residue burning (down from 33737 incidents in 2023 to 8391 in 2024). In the meanwhile, with the ban/restrictions on exports of Basmati by India in 2023, the Pakistani Punjab farmers jumped in to fill this void.

They knew that with the world’s largest exporter absent from the market, someone would need to fill the gap. They increased the sowing of Basmati. Pakistanis have had a general indifference to the smoke from their fields as the wind direction would normally carry the fumes eastwards into the Indian Punjab and Haryana plains during the winters keeping them immune to their burning of crop residue. But problems arose when Pakistani farmers started to burn their stalk residue after their harvest in October 2024. Largely unchecked, due to failing governance in the present turbulent times, the smoke that billowed from their farms was unprecedented.

During late October and early November 2024, the upper tropical westerly jetstream had weakened and moved northwards of the Pakistani Punjab airspace. This caused the smoke billowing from these fires to remain saturated within Pakistan’s airshed. As a result, Pakistani cities like Lahore and Multan were left reeling and gasping for clean air in October-November 2024. They became the most polluted cities in the world with AQI levels of 1914 (AQI level of 300 plus being considered ‘hazardous’). By the third week of November, the wind pattern resumed its usual path, bringing fumes and pollution into India. This was compounded by the burning of crop residue by some of our own farmers in Punjab. The smoke and the fumes blew through the usual path of the Potwar plateau and Northern Aravalli ridge into Delhi.

The Potwar plateau and the northern ridge of the Aravallis (the Delhi Ridge) form an orifice that acts similar to a compressed nozzle of a watering pipe that is used in any garden. The narrowed mouth (orifice) accelerates the flow into a narrow area. The funnel action between this geographical orifice has always brought in the winds from northwestern parts into Delhi in an accelerated manner. This time too, the smoke from Pakistan and India Punjab gushed in, exacerbating the already poor air quality of Delhi and NCR. According to the estimates of the IITM, Pune, farm fire contribution to Delhi’s daily air quality that had largely been below 35 per cent till early November, peaked to almost 40 per cent during the next few days of November 2024.

Delhi started choking like never before and the pollution control authorities were left clueless. Despite taking all the preventive and timely measures, Delhi still bore the brunt and the fumes pummelled citizens like never before, albeit this time due to the cross border farm fires. Who would have ever imagined that the sanctions and actions of the West against Russia would have such an effect on the air quality of Delhi and in such a big and dramatic way.

The food inflation triggered by the Russian-Ukraine conflict led to the banning of rice exports by India (the world’s largest exporter of rice) which then impacted the cropping patterns and gave rise to crop residue burning causing extreme deterioration of air quality across the South Asian region. What it shows is that inaction in one part of our planet can adversely affect the other part in an amplified manner. This also builds a strong case for a more harmonised, coordinated and integrated response towards clean air across South Asia. We need to reassess all aspects and perspectives for accelerating action for clean air in this Global World of ours, or should we say, “…. in this Glocal (Global plus Local) world of ours”.

(The writer is an IAS officer and Secretary, Environment Department, Government of West Bengal.)