India's paddy stubble burning season has begun, and the state at the top of the count is not Punjab but Madhya Pradesh, Down To Earth's Bhagirath reports. A bulletin of 6 October from the Consortium for Research on Agroecosystem Monitoring and Modelling from Space (CREAMS) at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) recorded crop residue burning at 287 locations in seven states between 15 September and 6 October.
The fires were spread as follows: Madhya Pradesh 118, Punjab 88, Uttar Pradesh 65, Rajasthan 10, Haryana 4, and Delhi and Uttarakhand one each. On 6 October alone the satellites picked up 33 fires, 24 of them in Madhya Pradesh, or 73% of the day's total. CREAMS tracks active fires from satellite data and publishes bulletins and dashboards; cloud cover over parts of Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and the hills of Uttarakhand hampered detection.
Punjab's 88 incidents are the lowest the state has recorded for this period in the past seven years, and it has not reached double figures on any day this season. Madhya Pradesh, by contrast, has reached double figures on five days, and its 118 incidents are its highest for the period.
The trend is not new. Burning has fallen sharply in Punjab and Haryana while rising in Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh and Rajasthan. Between 15 September and 30 November 2025, 33,028 incidents were recorded in six states, and 17,067 of them, more than half, were in Madhya Pradesh. Uttar Pradesh had 7,290, Punjab 5,114, Rajasthan 2,890, Haryana 662 and Delhi 5.
Experts link Madhya Pradesh's rise to the climate crisis and changing cropping. They say the state is following Punjab's path: farmers are switching to paddy from soybean, black gram and other kharif crops because extreme weather is harder on those crops, and after the paddy harvest many burn the stubble as the easiest way to clear the field.
Photo: Neil Palmer (CIAT) / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Source: Down To Earth
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