美国国家公共电台 NPR What Will Persuade Rice Farmers In Punjab To Stop Setting Fires In Their Fields?

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STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:

Northern India has some of the worst air quality in the world. This month, pollution in the capital, New Delhi, hit 20 times what the World Health Organization considers safe. Make a list of the world's 10 most polluted cities and nine of them will be in India. It's partly from car exhaust and from industry, and it's partly from the burning of crop residue¹ hundreds of miles away, which NPR's Lauren Frayer went to see.

LAUREN FRAYER, BYLINE²: This is really dry straw. It's what's left over from the rice harvest. And the fastest way to get rid of it is for the farmer to literally³ set it on fire. It's really hot, and it generates these huge clouds of smoke that are just blowing across the fields here. I've got to step back.

AMANDEEP SINGH: (Speaking Punjabi).

FRAYER: Amandeep Singh grew up breathing this smoke. He's from a long line of farmers here in India's breadbasket, Punjab, who've always burned their crops.

A. SINGH: (Through interpreter) It smells horrible, and it hurts our other crops because there isn't proper sunlight for them when the sky clouds over with the smoke.

FRAYER: So Amandeep broke with tradition this year. He bought a machine to mulch the rice rather than burning it. Amandeep says half of his farmer neighbors have done the same because of an outcry over pollution. But farmers dispute how much of it is from them rather than from traffic or industry.

MANJEET SINGH: Now farmers are too much aware that this is not good. This pollution is not good. But when cost is involved...

FRAYER: Manjeet Singh is a professor at Punjab Agricultural University. He sends grad students door to door to convince farmers to mulch rather than burn. It can be a tough sell, he says.

M. SINGH: They have to buy those machines, and then to operate those machines, the diesel⁴ is required or labor⁵ is required.

FRAYER: Starting this year, the government is reimbursing⁶ farmers for part of the cost of mulching machines. At an outdoor laboratory at IIT Delhi - the local equivalent of Stanford or MIT - some of India's best and brightest have come up with another alternative to crop burning.

PRACHEER DUTTA: So this is the rice straw that we’ve actually sourced. Six hundred KGs of that have been brought to us.

FRAYER: Inventor Pracheer Dutta convinced Punjabi farmers to rake up their rice straw and sell it to him rather than setting it on fire.

DUTTA: We put it through a machine. It's basically a big pressure cooker. And we just put in a solvent⁷.

FRAYER: They end up with fibers⁸ that can be used to make paper plates, fabric⁹ or bio fuel.

KULDEEP SINGH: (Speaking Punjabi).

FRAYER: Back up north in Punjab, another farmer, Kuldeep Singh, has begrudgingly¹⁰ stopped burning his rice straw.

K. SINGH: (Through interpreter) The local government banned crop burning here. That's why I stopped. I don't want to pay a fine. Otherwise, I would have kept doing it. Burning sterilizes¹¹ the soil. It kills pests.

FRAYER: He argues with environmental campaigners who tell him mulching is better. It leaves nutrients¹² in the soil. Campaigner Subhash Chandra Sharma says farmers don't like academics coming here and telling them what's best for their land.

SUBHASH CHANDRA SHARMA: There are few farmers. They are having a traditional thinking, and it becomes very difficult to change their mindset. It takes a long time, but this - I can say this is the beginning of a noble cause.

FRAYER: A noble cause, he says, to clear the smog that's choking people in India's capital hundreds of miles away. Lauren Frayer, NPR News, in rural Punjab, India.

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