By late October, Punjab’s countryside wears a quiet urgency. The combines have almost finished their rounds, the straw lies flat across hundreds of fields, and a thin veil of haze hovers over the plains. In the past three days alone, officials have counted more than 600 farm fires, pushing the season’s total to over 1 600. Each plume marks another field hurriedly cleared as harvesting draws to a close and wheat sowing presses in.

A cycle that returns every autumn

The rhythm has become familiar. As soon as paddy harvesting ends, the matchsticks come out. Farmers know the practice is frowned upon, yet the calendar leaves them little room. Between the last truckload of rice and the first line of wheat, there is scarcely a fortnight. The soil must be cleared, levelled and ready, or yields will suffer.

Many farmers describe it not as a choice but as a race they cannot afford to lose. Mechanical residue management costs several thousand rupees per acre; hiring labour takes longer and costs more. “If I burn, I’m wrong,” says Gurmukh Singh, who owns four acres near Sangrur. “If I delay sowing, I lose my crop. The fire finishes in one hour; the machine takes three days.” His words carry neither defiance nor pride only fatigue.

Counting the fires

Official satellite images show red dots scattered across Punjab’s map. The clusters are thickest in the Malwa belt, where the rice acreage is largest. Barnala, Bathinda and Mansa districts have seen the sharpest rise this week. In a single day, authorities reported 224 new incidents.

For the administration, each red dot represents both a farmer’s predicament and a governance failure. The farm fires are fewer than the peaks seen five years ago, yet the pattern remains stubborn. Every year’s “better numbers” still translate into thousands of fires and a familiar haze drifting eastward.

The hidden cost of speed

The harvesting machines that sweep across the fields leave behind thick stalks. Removing them safely requires attachments such as the Super-SMS or Happy Seeder tools meant to mulch or sow without burning. Despite subsidies, they remain beyond reach for many. Co-operative hiring centres exist, but when every farmer finishes cutting at once, demand outpaces supply.

Add to that the labour crunch. Migrant workers who once cleared residue by hand have found steadier work elsewhere. Diesel prices and equipment rentals climb each season. Against this arithmetic, fire is the cheapest labourer.

The cost, however, is borne collectively. Each tonne of straw burned releases carbon dioxide, methane, and fine particulate matter. The heat sterilises the soil’s surface, killing microbes and robbing it of organic matter. Over time, fields require more fertiliser to recover what the flames took away.

Smoke without borders

The smoke never stops at the edge of the field. A fire that begins in Moga at dusk can blur Delhi’s skyline by dawn. The same ash that settles on a tractor here lands on windshields two hundred kilometres away. In that sense, farm fires flatten boundaries between villages and cities, between farmers and commuters.

Every year, air-quality monitors in the National Capital Region swing from red to purple as the burning peaks. For city dwellers, the crisis arrives as a suffocating haze. For those who lit the fields, it ends as a cleared plot ready for seed. The irony is hard to miss: rural haste translates into urban breathlessness.

A policy puzzle

Successive governments have promised to break this cycle. Satellite monitoring has improved; fines are imposed; awareness drives are constant. Yet enforcement meets its limit on the ground. A single district can record hundreds of small fires in one evening. Chasing each offender is impossible, and officials quietly admit that punishment alone achieves little.

Schemes encouraging in-situ residue management have seen partial success. The Centre provides financial aid for machinery; states operate custom-hiring centres. But paperwork, delays and maintenance costs discourage many. “The machine is good,” says Baldev Kaur, a farmer from Ferozepur, “but when it breaks, no one comes to repair it. So next year, we burn again.”

The government’s dilemma mirrors the farmers’: speed versus sustainability. Policies move slowly; crops do not wait.

Beyond blame

Public conversation around stubble burning often tilts toward blame. Environmentalists point to farmers; farmers point to policy. Yet both agree on one truth for the current model of intensive rice-wheat cultivation leaves little flexibility. The high-yield paddy that built Punjab’s prosperity also tied it to a rigid calendar.

Experts argue that the only durable answer lies in crop diversification: moving away from water-hungry paddy toward maize, pulses or vegetables. But the shift requires procurement guarantees and market infrastructure neither quick nor simple. Until then, paddy harvesting will continue to produce mountains of straw that must be cleared before winter.

Experiments and alternatives

Some districts have begun collecting residue for biomass power plants and paper mills. A few entrepreneurs are experimenting with converting stubble into packaging material or compressed fuel. Where these links work, burning decreases. The challenge is building enough of them, close enough to farms, and paying farmers promptly.

Scientists from Punjab Agricultural University have promoted microbial decomposers that can break down straw within weeks. Early trials show promise, but farmers remain cautious. The spray needs moisture and time-luxuries in a dry, hurried season. Without assured results, many hesitate to risk their next crop.

The human dimension

In village after village, the story repeats. At dusk, when temperatures drop, small fires flicker like distant candles. Children watch from rooftops; elders stand by quietly. For a brief moment, the field glows. Then the smoke thickens, and the stars disappear.

For the farmer, the night brings relief from work finished and land cleared. For everyone else, it brings another breath of ash. This duality defines Punjab’s late autumn: pride in efficiency shadowed by guilt over pollution.

Towards a clearer sky

Environmental groups suggest a shift in focus from penalties to incentives. Paying farmers a modest sum per acre for not burning could cost less than treating the health fallout. Pilot schemes in a few districts have shown encouraging responses.

The larger lesson is that no single measure will suffice. The machinery, the decomposers, the awareness drives all work only when combined with empathy for those whose livelihoods depend on those fires. The question is not merely how to stop burning, but how to make not burning easier.

Closing Note

As The United Indian looks across Punjab’s flat expanse this week, the scene is both haunting and familiar-golden fields turning grey, progress turning to haze. The farm fires that light up the night are not rebellion; they’re a shorthand for how policy, economics, and survival meet at the edge of the field.

Each harvesting season promises reform, and each winter the sky answers back with smoke. Until empathy reaches as far as enforcement, and until solutions pay as quickly as fire saves, the story will repeat itself in the same exhausted rhythm one spark at a time.