Dubious distinction

How Madhya Pradesh displaced Punjab as the country's leading state in stubble burning

- BHAGIRATH SHEOPUR

HARIOM YADAV has seen a clear and rapid change in the farming pattern of his village. “About 70 per cent of farmlands in Silpuri are under paddy. This was not the case a few years ago,” says the 50-year-old farmer from Madhya Pradesh’s Sheopur district. The popularity of paddy has brought with it a known side effect—stubble burning. Last year, the district topped the country in stubble-burning incidents. The trend was same across the state.

Between September 15 and November 30 last year, Madhya Pradesh recorded 16,360 incidents Of stubble fire—the highest in the country—as per a bulletin released by the Consortium for Research on Agroecosystem Monitoring and Modelling from Space (CREAMS) on November 30, 2024 (see ‘Burning trend’). CREAMS is under the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi, and uses remote-sensing satellite technology to capture stubble-burning incidents in six states where the practice is prevalent—Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Delhi and Rajasthan. The CREAMS data shows that Madhya Pradesh had 44 per cent of the 37,602 stubble-burning cases reported from the six states in 2024.

Historically, Punjab has reported most paddy stubble burning cases. But in 2024 it had 10,909 stubble burning cases—nearly 5,000 less than Madhya Pradesh. CREAMS data also shows that Madhya Pradesh had five districts with more than 1,000 cases of stubble burning—Sheopur, Jabalpur, Hoshangabad, Gwalior and Datia (see ‘Fire incidents’ on p48), while Punjab had only two—Sangrur (1,725 incidents) and Ferozepur (1,342 incidents). With 2,508 cases, Sheopur saw the most stubble fire incidents in the country.