India’s official systems for tracking stubble burning fail to detect the extent of crop residue being set on fire in Punjab and Haryana, according to a new study by the non-profit organisation International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology released on Monday.
The burning of crop residue is among the contributors to air pollution in Delhi, which is often ranked the world’s most polluted capital city.
The Union government has claimed that there has been a sharp fall in stubble-burning cases in 2025, as compared to previous years.
On December 1, the Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change told Parliament that between September 15 and November 30, Punjab recorded 5,114 farm-fire incidents and Haryana recorded 662, a drop of roughly 90% compared with 2022.
However, according to the report by the environmental research organisation released on Monday, the official figures are misleading because the government relies on active fire counts. Through this, only those fires that a satellite can see at the moment it passes overhead are recorded.
India’s national farm-fire monitoring system uses data from the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer on the Terra and Aqua satellites and the Visible Infrared Imaging Radiometer Suite on the Suomi-National Polar-orbiting Partnership satellite.
These are polar-orbiting satellites, which observe the landscape only at fixed times of the day.
The report added that farmers have shifted to burning crop residue in the late afternoon and early evening, while the satellites capture fire activity between 10.30 am and 1.30 pm.
As a result, large numbers of fires never appear in the official record, claimed the report.
On November 12, the Supreme Court said it would examine whether farmers in Punjab and Haryana were burning crop stubble after the satellite mapping farm fires had passed over their areas. The remark came after Amicus Curiae Aparajita Singh told the court that the number of fires detected by satellites did not match the actual fire spots on the ground.
An amicus curiae is a person who is not a party to the case but provides advice or information to the court.
She also said she had received data from a scientist at the United States’ National Aeronautics and Space Administration that claimed that farm fires were on the rise.
The International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology said that India needs to adopt burnt-area mapping to track stubble burning. This method uses high-resolution imagery to identify charred fields, even when the fires were not observed.
Using burnt-area mapping from the Sentinel-2 satellite, the report said that there has been a decline in stubble burning in the two states.
It said that in Punjab, the burnt area in the Kharif season declined to about 20,000 square kilometres in 2025 from a peak of 31,447 square kilometres in 2022, a reduction of 37%.
In Haryana, the burnt area has fallen to 8,812 square kilometres in 2025 from 11,633 square kilometres in 2019, a 25% reduction, although the trend is not consistent, it added.
Air quality deteriorates sharply in the winter months in Delhi due to a combination of factors, including stubble burning from Punjab and Haryana, vehicular pollution, the lighting of firecrackers in Diwali, falling temperatures, decreased wind speeds and emissions from industries and coal-fired plants.
Delhi’s air quality index stood at 287, in the “poor” category, as per the Sameer application at 1.05 pm.
Of the 40 monitoring stations in the city, air quality was “very poor” at 16, “poor” at 23 and “moderate” at one, the application, which provides hourly updates published by the Central Pollution Control Board, showed.
An index value between 0 and 50 indicates “good” air quality, between 51 and 100 indicates “satisfactory” air quality and between 101 and 200 indicates “moderate” air quality. As the index value increases further, air quality deteriorates. A value of 201 and 300 means “poor” air quality, while between 301 and 400 indicates “very poor” air.
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