Farm-Fire Burnt Area Protocol Unfinalised Despite 2024 Supreme Court Scrutiny

The news

Nearly two years after the Supreme Court flagged the issue, India still has no finalised protocol to measure the area of farmland burnt by stubble burning. The Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI) told The Indian Express in a Right to Information reply that burnt-area estimates for Punjab and Haryana remain “unverified” and “unfinalised”. The Commission for Air Quality Management (CAQM) had formed an expert committee under the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) in January 2024 to standardise a methodology for mapping the burnt area, but the protocol is still under validation.

The missing metric matters because a falling number of detected farm fires does not necessarily mean a comparable reduction in the land burnt or in pollution. On 22 November 2024, a Supreme Court bench of Justices A S Oka and A G Masih questioned the discrepancy between declining fire counts and rising burnt-area estimates. Justice Oka observed that “the extent of fire can be demonstrated only by a burnt area”. IARI said it was “only researching” the use of satellite imagery and that “there is yet no standardized methodology for this activity”. The institute added that burnt-area statistics are “work in progress”.

The validation exercise uses Sentinel-2 satellites of the European Space Agency, which revisit an area every five days. CAQM’s ground-truthing exercises during the 2025 kharif, 2026 rabi and the current kharif season have found differences between satellite maps and ground observations. A senior official said that during ground truthing, teams are “unable to detect more than 50 per cent of satellite detected farm fires”. A November 2025 study by ISRO’s Space Applications Centre documented a shift in peak farm-burning activity towards late afternoon and evening in Punjab and Haryana, and the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology found that over 90 per cent of large fires in both states in 2024 and 2025 occurred after 3 pm, potentially escaping conventional polar-orbiting satellite overpasses.

How is farm-fire monitoring done now?

IARI’s CREAMS (Consortium for Research on Agroecosystem Monitoring and Modeling from Space) Laboratory monitors residue burning using satellite data and publishes daily farm-fire bulletins. It compiles paddy-burning figures using fire-event data from NRSC, ISRO. A standardised protocol for counting active farm fires has been in place since 2021, but that protocol counts fire events detected at the time of satellite overpass, not the total area burnt.

What has the research found so far?

An IARI study covering 2018–2021 estimated that an average 49.1 per cent of Punjab’s paddy area and 17.69 per cent of Haryana’s was burnt each harvesting season. Haryana’s burnt-area footprint grew at a compound annual rate of 9.6 per cent. The iFOREST report estimated that in Haryana, farm-fire incidents fell from 1,406 in 2024 to 662 in 2025, but burnt area rose from 7,117 sq km to 8,812 sq km. In Punjab, incidents fell from 10,909 to 5,114, while burnt area declined from 23,262 sq km to 19,757 sq km — a much smaller drop.

What are the technical challenges?

In the intensive agricultural belts of Punjab and Haryana, standing crops, harvested straw and scorched earth occur close together during the narrow harvesting window, making it difficult for satellite-based models to distinguish burnt fields from dry crop residue. Validation must assess both missed burns and land incorrectly classified as burnt. CAQM’s ground-truthing exercises have found that teams cannot detect more than half of satellite-detected farm fires on the ground.