Agricultural Waste Burning in Northern India – Towards Integrated Cost Analysis and Farmers’ Perspectives

Abstract:

Rice farmers in Northern India burn the rice “stubble” left in the fields after a harvest in order to clear land for the next sowing season. During several weeks in the burning season, half a billion residents of the Indo-Gangetic Plain, including those living in the national capital New Delhi, are routinely exposed to levels of fine particulate matter that are ~100x greater than the annual WHO standard. Despite a ban on Agricultural Waste Burning (AWB), 9.96 million metric tons of rice residue was burnt in Punjab in 2018. Several ‘active management’ alternatives to AWB that include in-situ and ex-situ rice residue management are available to rice farmers. However, financial, logistical and institutional challenges make their adoption and impact inadequate.

This work focuses on alternatives to AWB in the Punjab, and particularly on (i) farmers’ perspectives on available active management practices and the challenges in adopting them (ii) cost of residue management and how it influences practice (iii) role of government incentives in reducing AWB. We expand on existing cost analyses of residue management practices by conducting semi-structured interviews with farmers and key experts to better understand how operational factors and cascading impacts may affect the profitability of different alternatives. These considerations include: government subsidies, fixed bonus incentives, access to required machinery, and pest implications. Our results show that given timely government incentives of a fixed bonus and subsidy on machinery, the cost of rice residue management through active management practices are comparable to that of full or partial residue burn. However, due to short time window, lack of timely arrival of government subsidy and uncertainty of fixed bonuses, status quo of residue burn is more convenient and cost effective for farmers in Punjab. Farmers also highlight concerns of groundwater depletion and the need for crop diversification, to address both issues of air quality and depleting groundwater resources. These findings point to the importance of addressing AWB as more than simply a problem of residue management, but instead as part of a landscape of issues, including the role of rice production in Punjab for national food security, depleting groundwater, and short time duration for rice harvest.