CII adopts 100 villages to check farm fires in Punjab

Punjab Geography and Environment

To mitigate air pollution caused by stubble burning, the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) has adopted more than 100 villages and 1,00,000 acres of farm area in the districts of Ludhiana, Barnala and Patiala in Punjab, and Rohtak, Sirsa and Fatehabad in Haryana to enable zero crop-residue burning.
The CII’s ‘Cleaner Air, Better Life’ initiative is implementing and piloting optimal solutions to help farmers adopt zero stubble burning.
The CII has created an ecosystem to engage stakeholders, including experts, corporates, state governments, village community and farmer groups, to implement possible solutions to the issue of stubble burning.
It is proactively engaging with more than 15,000 farmers to :

Equipment has been installed to monitor village-level air pollution data as well as to measure the impact of reduced stubble burning.
More than 3,000 school students in Punjab, the youth and corporate volunteers are joining the CII in this movement to enable zero stubble burning.
The intervention is supporting farmer groups to procure a range of farm machinery, including Happy Seeder, Zero Till, Mulcher, etc, and make these available to farmers on a nominal rent.
The use of these machines on a sharing basis is enabling farmers to adopt in-situ straw management practices, leading to zero stubble burning and sustainable farming.
Potential ex-situ straw management models are also being piloted and research is being conducted with an aim to develop a road map for straw value chain.
The CCI intervention is an extension of its pilot project in 2018 in 19 villages and on 16,000 acres of farmland in Punjab, engaging more than 3,000 farmers. The impact of the intervention was encouraging. Post intervention, 80% farmers adopted no-stubble burning approach and a total of 12,000 acres of farmland (75% of the total area under paddy in the adopted villages) became free of stubble burning in 2018, compared to 550 acres (3.5% of farmland) in 2017.