Burnt area under paddy straw highest in last kharif season

Tribune News Service

Deepender Deswal

Hisar, June 28

Contrary to the perception that the incidents of stubble burning had declined over the years in Haryana, the burnt area of paddy was the highest in the last kharif season last year.

Growing menace

The burnt area of paddy straw was 16.96% in 2018, 17.70% in 2019 and 15.75% in 2020, revealed the data procured by a farmer through the RTI Act from the state Agriculture Department

A fire spot may spread over multiple acres

We don’t measure the total burnt area of a particular fire spot and provide only the number of spots. One fire spot may be in an acre of farm or may be spread over multiple acres. — Dr VS Arya, Director, HARSAC

The Haryana Agriculture Department’s data indicated that the paddy area which was burnt had increased in the last kharif season (2021) compared to 2018 and 2019 in Haryana, indicating the growing menace of stubble burning by the farmers in Haryana. About 24.19% of the entire paddy area was burnt for disposing of the paddy straw, the data compiled by the Agriculture Department on November 30, 2021, revealed.

Earlier, the burnt area of paddy straw was 16.96% in 2018, 17.70% in 2019 and 15.75% in 2020, revealed the date procured by a farmer through the RTI Act from the Haryana’s Agriculture Department.

The farmer Sajjan Kumar had filed the RTI application to seek information of the area burnt by the paddy farmers in the last four years.

According to this data, out of the total area of 14.47 lakh hectare paddy in 2018, paddy area burnt was 2.45 lakh hectares, which was 16.96% of the total area. Similarly, the figure of burnt paddy area was 2.37 lakh hectares out of the total paddy area of 13.40 lakh hectare (17.70%) in 2019 and 2.16 lakh hectares of the total 13.72 lakh hectare (15.76%) in 2020. But the previous year saw an upward trend of nearly 9% in the burnt area as 3.54 lakh hectare paddy area was reported as burnt out of the total rice area of 14.63 lakh hectares in 2021 on November 30, 2021. The officials had claimed at the end of the kharif harvesting season that the number of farm fires had gone down by around 30% in Haryana.

Last year’s data revealed that Fatehabad had the largest area of burnt area of paddy at 62.5 thousand hectares of 1.17 lakh hectares of paddy which is about 53.37% of the total area. Kurukshetra (38.60%) is second, Panipat (34.66%) second and Karnal is at third spot with a burnt area of 34.10%.

It may be recalled that the Haryana Space Applications Centre (HARSAC), a collaborator of ISRO, which is a nodal agency for Remote Sensing and GIS applications of the Haryana Government compiles the data of crop stubble burning in Haryana. HARSAC is located on the campus of the Chaudhary Charan Singh Haryana Agriculture University Hisar.

Dr VS Arya, director, HARSAC, stated that they capture the images of the active fire locations (AFLs) through satellite and submit the data to the agency concerned of the Haryana Government for further analysis and action. While refusing to share any data compiled by the HARSAC, he stated that they provide the locations and numbers of the AFLs captured through the satellite. “We don’t measure the total burnt area of a particular fire spot and provide only the number of spots. One fire spot may be in an acre of farm or may be spread over multiple acres,” he stated.

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