- English
Agricultural smoke from rice residue fires is now regarded as a dominant source of India’s autumn haze. Yet, the degree
to which yield-driven intensification amplifies this pollution remains uncertain. To assess this environmental issue, there
is an urgent need to analyze long-term datasets and to develop fine-grained fire-severity mapping. This study conducted
a 25-year, satellite- and ancillary-data-driven reconstruction (2000–2024) of paddy cultivation, burn severity, and Aerosol
Optical Depth (AOD) in Punjab’s Malwa region to close that knowledge gap. Multispectral Landsat scenes processed in
Google Earth Engine yielded annual Differenced Normalised Burn Ratio (dNBR) layers that were cross-validated with
MODIS active fire detections (κ = 0.79, overall accuracy = 0.86). District-level crop statistics were merged with MODIS
MAIAC AOD fields to create a district-year panel dataset on which trend tests and Pearson correlation were performed.
The results showed that while planted area expanded by only 21%, grain production rose by 59%, enlarging the regional
straw pool from 7.9 to 12.5 Mt. High- and moderate-high-severity scars doubled to 26,000 km² and, by 2024, accounted
for two-thirds of burned land. Post-monsoon AOD maxima rose from 0.80 in 2000 to 1.14 in 2016 and have remained
above 1.10 despite recent mitigation schemes. High-severity scar area alone explained 93% of the interannual variance in
AOD maxima (r = 0.93, p < 0.01), whereas total cropland was weakly related to aerosol loading. These findings confirm
that mechanised, yield-oriented agriculture, when unaccompanied by residue management reform, drives a shift from lowtemperature
burning to recurrent high-intensity fires with sustained aerosol burdens. Targeted deployment of balers, in-situ
incorporation machinery and strict enforcement within identified hotspots could deliver the most significant marginal gains
for the National Clean Air Programme.
- English
