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Opinion National Interest PoV 50-Word Edit

ThePrint On Camera Videos In Pictures

Society & Culture Around Town Book Excerpts Vigyapanti The Dating Story

More Judiciary Education YourTurn Work With Us Campus Voice

Punjab didn’t end stubble burning with bans. Gurudwaras played a role too

The results are documented. According to government data, fire incidents in Punjab fell by over 90 per cent, from nearly 80,000 in 2020 to 5,114 by 2025.

As the paddy harvest ends across Punjab every October, a familiar orange glow appears on the horizon. Farmers set fire to the stubble left behind, and within days, a thick grey haze settles over north India. In 2020, Punjab alone recorded nearly 80,000 fire incidents in a single paddy season, with more than half the state’s paddy area going up in smoke.

Bans were announced. Subsidies were offered. Awareness campaigns were launched. Yet the fires kept returning.

The persistence of stubble burning reveals a hard lesson about environmental policy: information alone rarely changes behaviour. People do.

In a village in Punjab, Jaswinder Kaur attended a camp unlike any she had been invited to earlier. Held within the premises of a Gurudwara, the session focused on crop residue management, water conservation and soil health. She listened carefully, asked questions, and returned home with new ideas. Over the following weeks, she shared what she had learned with the men in her household, neighbours and fellow villagers. 

“When women have access to the right information,” she later reflected, “We don’t just grow crops. We grow communities.”

Kaur does not own any land. In Punjab, women account for less than two per cent of landholders, despite contributing substantially to agricultural labour. Yet, she was an agent of change within a deeply patriarchal society. Her story points to a question that development practitioners, policymakers and behaviour-change experts have grappled with for decades: who carries change into a community, and how does it take root?

This is where the lessons from The Nature Conservancy’s PRANA (Promoting Regenerative and No-Burn Agriculture) programme in Punjab prove useful. When PRANA came to Punjab in 2021 to address the issues of stubble burning, it confronted an environmental policy problem that had been misread for a long time. Farmers were not burning because they were uninformed. They were burning because, in the narrow window between paddy harvest and wheat sowing, burning was fast, cheap, and familiar. 

Apart from these operational pressures, there was a deeper misalignment in how the problem had always been framed. Crop residue burning is........

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