Solely blaming stubble burning for Delhi’s pollution is incorrect

Delhi's air quality has turned extremely bad again with the Air Quality Index (AQI) hovering between severe and very severe category.

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This deterioration took place over the weekend without the burning of any stubble in the farm fields of Punjab and Haryana.The Delhi AQI on Tuesday crossed 430 and is expected to move upwards this week as the minimum temperature is expected to remain below 5 degrees Celsius range and because wind speed, which helps in disbursal of pollutants, is slow. These facts raise critical questions for policymakers and scientists who have blamed the farmers in Punjab and Haryana for Delhi’ and National Capital Region's (NCR) air pollution.Let's discuss some facts about the annual phenomenon of stubble burning.Normally the period between September and November 30 is considered the stubble burning period in Punjab and Haryana when farm fields are cleared for the winter crop. Stubble burning incidents in Punjab has come down from 81,042 in 2016, from when the data is available, to 10,909 in 2024, an eight-fold fall in eight years. The year-wise data shows that stubble fire incidents increased during Covid-19 pandemic years of 2020 and 2021 even though the air pollution level in Delhi did not spike as it happened in 2023 and 2024: This clearly indicates a delink between stubble fire incidents and Delhi poor air quality. Similarly, stubble burning incidents recorded in Haryana, where paddy stubble burning is 20% of the crop remains that are burnt, also dipped by almost 90% since 2016. In 2024, Haryana reported only 559 incidents of farm fires. Moreover, the department of science and technology's air appropriation analysis cannot distinguish between stubble and non-stubble contribution to air pollution as the measurement is through carbon (soot) content in air and comes under bio-mass burning category. Even satellites cannot disting