LAHORE: The Punjab government will maintain a zero-tolerance policy on the burning of rice and other crop residues through the coming harvest, Provincial Minister for Agriculture Syed Ashiq Hussain Kirmani said on Friday, chairing a review meeting at the Civil Secretariat in Lahore.
According to an official statement issued after the meeting, the minister said farmers are being discouraged from burning residue, with fines and warning notices issued where violations occur. Alternative arrangements for disposing of residue are being provided alongside the enforcement.
Kirmani said the awareness campaign would continue until rice harvesting is complete, and that print, electronic and social media would be used to carry it.
Secretary Agriculture Punjab Shakeel Ahmad Mian told the meeting that focal persons have been designated at both provincial and district level, and directed that coordination with district administrations be strengthened so enforcement measures are applied consistently.
The most concrete claim from the meeting concerned equipment. Kirmani said that three years ago Punjab had roughly 300 Super Seeders, a figure the present government has raised to 10,000 through subsidy.
He said the number of balers has gone from four to around 150, and harvesters from 100 to approximately 450.
Those three machines address the problem at different points. A Super Seeder sows wheat directly into unburnt rice stubble, cutting the residue into the soil as it goes, which removes the reason most farmers burn — the need to clear a field quickly for the next crop. Balers compress loose straw into transportable bales that can be sold as fodder or fuel, turning a disposal cost into a small return. Harvesters affect how much stubble is left standing in the first place.
Kirmani said last year saw a 70 per cent reduction in recorded residue-burning incidents.
The meeting falls in the narrow window before Punjab’s smog season. Rice harvesting in the province runs from roughly October into November, and the burning that has traditionally followed it overlaps with the weeks when falling temperatures and still air trap pollutants close to the ground across the Indus plain.
Stubble burning is one contributor among several. Vehicle emissions, brick kilns, industrial output and construction dust all feed Lahore’s winter air quality, and the relative share of each is contested. What distinguishes crop residue is that it is seasonal, concentrated, visible from satellite, and — unlike a city’s traffic fleet — theoretically addressable within a single harvest cycle.
That is why machinery subsidy has become the centre of provincial policy. Enforcement alone leaves a farmer with a field to clear and no method; the equipment is what makes the fine avoidable.
The figures the minister cited describe supply, not use. Punjab has roughly 4.8 million hectares under wheat and a rice belt concentrated in the Sheikhupura, Gujranwala, Hafizabad, Sialkot and Nankana districts, and 10,000 Super Seeders spread across that area means access depends heavily on local rental markets and service-provider schemes rather than individual ownership.
Smallholders — who farm most of Punjab’s cultivated area in parcels of a few acres — generally cannot buy a Super Seeder outright at prevailing prices. Whether the fleet reduces burning therefore depends less on the total number than on how quickly machines can be moved between fields during the two-to-three-week turnaround between harvesting rice and sowing wheat.
Three markers will indicate whether this season differs from previous ones: the number of fire counts recorded by satellite monitoring through October and November; the ratio of warning notices to actual fines collected, which shows whether enforcement is reaching beyond paperwork; and the rental availability of Super Seeders in the rice districts at peak turnaround.
The Lahore Times has requested district-level machinery deployment data and last season’s enforcement figures from the Agriculture Department.
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