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BULLETIN HIGHLIGHTS |
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- Editorial by Sunita Narain
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- Stories from Down To Earth
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Sunita Narain |
Editor, Down To Earth |
Twitter: @sunitanar |
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Last straw to stubble burning |
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Should farmers get paid for not burning their fields? This is an extremely contentious issue today as the northern Indian region stares at another winter, when stubble is burnt in fields and winds bring the pollution to cities like Delhi — already choking from the spit of vehicles and local sources of pollution. The logic behind this is that rewarding farmers with cash would dissuade them from burning their fields.
My logic, as an environmentalist and campaigner for clean air, is that this will be a perverse incentive. In other words, it will get easily abused so that there is more stubble burning as there will be the promise of the reward; and each year the amount of the reward will have to be raised. The incentive will become the perverse reason for doing what is clearly wrong. But, I am being screamed at in social media platforms; the taglines being that “I am elitist, ignorant, out of touch with reality” and, of course, “anti-farmer”.
That said, it is a fact when the reward was given last year — the Punjab government disbursed some Rs 29 crore to 31,231 farmers — the number of stubble fires actually went up from the previous year. But that is not even the point.
Farmers need assistance — there is no question about that. I am not even talking about the larger problem of agrarian distress, where farmers are caught in the pincer between high prices of inputs as against the need to depress food prices for consumers. This system that discounts the labour of farmers ends up discounting their soil and water systems as well. It needs to be fixed...
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From Down to Earth |
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