Burning crop residues in Punjab: a 2013 paper on the farmer’s view
A four-page 2013 paper took up crop residue burning in Indian Punjab from the farmer’s side. NASA Earth Observatory lists it as further reading beside its 2014 image of fires in Punjab.
What the study did and found
The paper is “Practice of burning of crop residues-farmer’s perspective”, by Rajvir Kaur, Balpreet Singh and V. L. Sharma, published in Environment and Ecology in 2013 (Kaur et al., 2013).
The authors put a 16-item questionnaire to 100 farmers in four villages of Hoshiarpur district, Punjab, and reported the answers as simple percentages (Kaur et al., 2013).
Most farmers questioned knew that burning harms the environment, but only a few knew that it also lowers soil fertility. Many were against laws to stop the practice. The reason most of them gave for burning was the need to clear fields quickly for the next crop.
Why it is cited
The referring page is NASA Earth Observatory’s “Stubble Burning in Northern India”, published in November 2014 with a satellite image of fires in Punjab. Its reference list gives the paper, and its text explains that many farmers burn rice debris so that fields can be readied quickly for wheat.
That use fits the paper’s main finding, as most farmers questioned named the rush to re-sow as their reason for burning (Kaur et al., 2013). The caption’s tonnage figure is not tied to any listed source.
The paper’s citation trail is thin. OpenAlex lists a single citing work, a 2019 study in Rangeland Ecology & Management of rural perceptions of burn-off practice in New Zealand.
Later work has filled in the farmer’s side: a 2022 review names low cost, simplicity, combine harvesting, the short gap before wheat and few uses for straw (Kaur et al., 2022), and a 2022 survey found that nearly half of farmers using in-situ machines still burned loose straw first (Kemanth et al., 2024).
The topic today
Official satellite counts of paddy-residue fires in Punjab fell from 83,002 in 2020 to 5,114 in 2025 (ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, CREAMS Laboratory, 2025), though geostationary studies suggest that part of this fall reflects fires lit later in the afternoon (Voiland, 2025). In November 2024 the compensation charged per burning incident was doubled (Press Information Bureau, Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change, 2024).
For the current picture, see our explainer Why Punjab Farmers Burn Stubble and What Fire Counts Show