Delhi’s fight against air pollution has more failures than success. As the Supreme Court lashed out at Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh on November 6, 2019, for not taking enough measures to curb crop residue burning in their farms, it also asked these states to reward farmers who refrained from doing so with Rs 100 per quintal of crop.
So what is Haryana doing right? The state started early, says S Narayanan, member secretary, Haryana Pollution Control Board.
It identified villages where farm fires were rampant last year and just as the kharif season began in June, it started distributing machines that can eliminate crop residue burning. “We did quite well on the technological front and supplied machines like Super sms, Rotavator, Happy Seeder and Zero Till Seed Drill,” he says.
“Any new technology takes time to be adopted,” says Kailash Chand Kalwania of the non-profit CIMMYT (International Maize and Wheat Improvement Centre). Last year, many farmers were given such machines on subsidy. They used it in small patches.
This year, they saw that the overall cost was less and the yield was high. Read more here.
Innovations 
