The world was already in the VUCA phase with a lot of Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity. Starting with the bipolar world of USA and USSR that changed to USA-China rivalry, to the latest being the war in Ukraine that started in the year 2022, these upheavals have impacted worldwide trade. A particular repercussion has been the volatile shifts in the food commodity market. The trade of wheat, maize, pulses, fertilizers etc., has been severely hit, leading to huge disruptions in the world food market between 2022-24. The food inflation and global shortage caused a huge impact on most of the middle-income and poor countries. It also led to the Indian Government banning the export of rice, inter alia, to control the inflation.
As we all know, in India, the export-quality rice has been grown in areas that traditionally have never grown rice before—Punjab, Haryana, and Western UP. The Green Revolution in the northwestern part of India gave rise to the use of groundwater for irrigation. These tubewell-fed irrigated fields of the northwest part grow the best quality of Basmati and other varieties of rice. The region accounts for the export of more than 70% of the world’s Basmati rice. The neighbouring Punjab province of Pakistan also grows Basmati but uses its traditional canal-fed irrigation system (a gift from post-partition when the majority of the fields fed by the canal system went to Pakistan, making it the largest canal network in the world). Pakistan contributes around 17% of the world’s traded basmati.
The sowing season for the Basmati crop is June-July, and the crop is usually harvested by November-early December each year. The grain of the Basmati is long, with the 1121 Sella Basmati being the longest and the most preferred worldwide. Known as the Pusa (hybrid 1121 ICAR) variety, the residue of the harvested paddy has an average stalk size of 130 cm that is left on the farm fields. This stalk is longer and harder to cut or uproot than a traditional paddy post-harvest residue stalk. Primarily, this Basmati stalk requires more labour and costs to remove.
Secondly, the next season of Rabi warrants clearance of all crop residue at the earliest so that the fields can be sown for Rabi crops each year. All this would mean that more effort would have had to be deployed in the fields of Punjab and Haryana to destalk their fields. However, after Covid and with the advent of better individual benefit schemes of almost all the State Governments and the Central Government, a lot of the traditional migrant labour has not returned to the fields of Punjab. Farming had witnessed a huge metamorphosis when the traditional hard-working Punjabi farmers started preferring employing daily or contractual cheap labour coming from Bihar, Jharkhand, and Bengal in the late 1980s. The agro-economic boom also led to the rise of social maladies such as drug abuse, as there was an abundance of agriculture-led prosperity and subcontracted physical labour. The intrinsic lethargy or reluctance in doing hard farm labour has now come in the youth of the region.
Thirdly, since these areas were also not traditionally rice-growing areas, the attack of pests and crop disease has been rampant. The Green Revolution was a period when Indian agriculture was converted into an industrial system of agri-farming. Modern methods and technology — including high-yielding variety (HYV) seeds, tractors, irrigation facilities, pesticides, and fertilizers — were adopted. Today, Punjab has become the pesticide & fertilizer capital of the Country. The domestic pesticide market has grown to an estimated Rs 20,000 crore. India developed 217,000 tonnes of pesticides in fiscal year 2019, and the rest was being imported from Russia and Ukraine. The cost of fertilizer rose worldwide, with Russia, being the largest exporter, having to cut down exports due to the sanctions.
Courtesy of the war and the sanctions on Russia, the movement of fertilizers and pesticides has also been severely restricted from the Black Sea. This has led to the rising costs of the pesticides and fertilizers, especially in India. Without the pesticides, the Punjab farmers have been further pushed to fall back to their traditional methods of Crop Burning. Traditional belief has also added impetus to the post-harvest crop residue burning in which the farmers still believe that the field nutrients get replenished and the pests get killed due to the post-harvest burning. Thence the only option left for the Punjab farmers in 2022-23 was to deploy mechanized implements to uproot the long and hardy stalks of their paddy crop residue. But that would have led to an increase in the costs of production, which in today’s market would have made the entire pricing of rice uncompetitive.
The Ministry of Environment, Forests & Climate Change, Government of India, (MoEFCC) was aware of this clear and present danger. They took ample preventive steps in Punjab and Haryana under the National Clean Air Program (NCAP) and other programs whereby mechanised equipment was provided to the farmers to remove their paddy stalks. However, as the classical story goes, these equipments have been cornered by a few and thereafter distributed to the large farmers who have always had a clout in the system. The medium and small farmers who were already reeling under the double whammy of the rising costs were mostly left out from this Government-led effort of direct intervention. Therefore, the best option left with such farmers was to burn the crop residue and the hardy stalks, which is what they precisely did (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. However, this generates much higher stalk and quantity of residue, which again becomes a bane for the farmers of Punjab. Burning the residue is the fastest and cheapest method, believed by the farmers to be a micronutrient saviour with the least labour and effort. This became preferred by the small and medium farmers of Punjab.
However, due to the banning of the exports of rice from India in 2023, only a few farmers (and that too mostly small and medium farmers) had sown Basmati in 2023. This reduction in the sowing of Indian Basmati led the Pakistanis to increase their sowing of Basmati on the Pakistan side way back in 2023.
Due to the pre-emptive steps taken by the Government, farm fires were fewer till the last days of October in 2024. However, during November this year in 2024, the Pakistan side started to burn their residue rampantly after the harvest of their paddy. The systems and the fiscal condition of Pakistan created an exponential problem. As it is, their political and administrative system has been rendered kaput over the past 2 years with the Military reasserting itself on a democratically elected governing system. The World Bank also assessed this problem much earlier and sounded the two countries by launching the Air Quality Management Program—Indus Gangetic Plain in 2023.
But due to zero steps by the nonfunctional governance on the Pakistani side, traditional assumption of the smoke being carried to the Indian side due to the wind pattern and a general complacency, the farmers on the Pakistan side indulged in rampant burning of their paddy crop residue. But in 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 in their own areas.
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 (with anything above an AQI level of 300 being considered the worst category of ‘hazardous’). However, by the third week of November, the wind pattern resumed blowing in its usual path, bringing all the fumes and pollution from the Pakistan side into India. This was further compounded by the farm fires by our own Punjabi medium and small farmers. The smoke and the fumes blew through their usual path of the Potwar plateau and Northern Aravalli ridge into Delhi.
Interestingly, 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. Thence 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 Punjab gushed in exacerbating the already poor air quality of Delhi. The problem has gotten further compounded due to the reduction in tree cover in these regions as earlier the bio fence of tree lines enroute used to break the wind flow of northwest India into Delhi. The fumes in November 2024 pummelled Delhi like never before.
The IITM, Pune reported that normally, stubble burning contributes below 30% of the poor air quality of Delhi in the winter months. However, this year the contribution rose to almost 40%. Vehicular emissions remain the second-largest source of pollution at 11.7%, followed by industrial activities (2.4%), residential practices (3%), and road dust, construction, and garbage burning at 1% each.
This is enough evidence that extrinsic causes have added to the poor air quality of the national capital, with the primary cause being stubble burning in Pakistan as well as India, which led to Delhi choking. But the preceding and underlying reason for this dramatic deterioration was the food inflation triggered by the Russia-Ukraine conflict, which led to the ban of rice exports by India, the largest contributor of rice in the global food market. Who would have ever imagined that the sanctions and actions of the West against Russia would affect the air of Delhi in such a dramatic way? This phenomenon also shows us how actions of indiscipline in one part of the Planet adversely affect the other part in an amplified manner. This also makes a strong case for taking up Climate Action in a much more coordinated manner by examining all perspectives in this Global World of ours- or should we say, “… in this Glocal (Global plus Local) World of ours”.
