Delhi’s smog problem cannot be fixed from space

• By David Fickling / Bloomberg Opinion

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Launched around the turn of the millennium, NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites have served as workhorses of climate observation for decades.

From 700km above Earth, they track clouds, algae, forests, smoke plumes and fires, producing some of the most iconic images ever captured from orbit: Hurricane Katrina barreling toward New Orleans, Saharan sandstorms blotting out the Atlantic Ocean and the “blue marble” image of Earth familiar from early iPhone screens. Yet farmers in India have been thwarting these sophisticated eyes in the sky with techniques that have barely changed since the Stone Age.

That helps explain why technocratic efforts to tackle Delhi’s chronic air pollution keep falling short.

It would be comforting to think that better regulation and its implementation could clear the apocalyptic haze that descends on Delhi every winter. The harder truth is that until the political and economic incentives behind the pollution change, choking smog would remain an annual blight.

Satellites once seemed to offer part of the solution. One significant source of Delhi’s seasonal pollution is farmers burning rice straw after the monsoon harvest to clear their fields for the winter wheat crop. Haryana, Punjab and Uttar Pradesh, the states surrounding the capital, produce about one-quarter of India’s rice. Since 2021, government authorities have been trying to use satellites to tip off local officials to illegal fire hot spots and send out enforcement crews.

However, the initiative ran headlong into an adage known as Goodhart’s law: Once a measure becomes a target, people learn how to game it.

The satellites only pass over northern India in a brief window of the day, between 10am and 2pm. A 2024 India Today investigation found that government officials in Punjab were tipping farmers off about the schedule, allowing them to shift their burning later in the day.

The result was revealing. The number of large farm fires occurring after 3pm in the state went from about 3 percent in 2021 to more than 90 percent in 2024 and last year. Some of the most sophisticated monitoring technology humanity has ever devised is being outwitted by farmers using a technique that has existed for thousands of years.

The stick of satellite surveillance was developed in part because an earlier technocratic carrot had failed. In the late 2010s, officials hoped that mechanized equipment could eliminate the need for stubble burning. Tractor-drawn machines such as the Happy Seeder and Super Seeder, which allow farmers to sow wheat directly into fields without first burning the rice residue, were touted as a way to curb smog, boost yields and modernize Indian agriculture.

That did not work. Farmers who switched to seeders had to pay for the machinery, as well as diesel to power it. Poorer smallholders relying on community-owned equipment might have to wait their turn during a narrow planting window when every lost day costs money.

Against the speed and simplicity of dropping a match, machinery struggled to compete. About one-quarter of the crop-residue machines distributed in Punjab since 2018 are out of action. Even among farmers who use them, about half still burn stubble.

The root of the problem lies in the political economy of Indian agriculture. The government has made growing rice extraordinarily attractive in northern India, with guaranteed floor prices, near-unlimited procurement, and subsidies for water pumping and fertilizer. Those incentives encourage farmers to produce vast quantities of a crop that leaves them with an equally large amount of residue to clear in a hurry. Against such powerful economics, Happy Seeders and satellite surveillance never stood much of a chance.

The prospects for change are about as gloomy as Delhi’s skies during Diwali, when residents burn firecrackers that deepen the seasonal smog. Decades of efforts to shift India’s rice and wheat bowl away from Punjab and Haryana and toward eastern states have barely dented paddy cultivation near the capital.

Attempts to persuade farmers to switch to less environmentally damaging crops such as corn and lentils have fared little better. The result is a remarkable paradox: India keeps encouraging farmers to grow rice beyond even the needs of its 1.4 billion people. Government inventories have swelled to record levels this year — 10 times above the required buffer.

The clearest sign that Delhi is on a path to cleaner air would be a decline in the amount of paddy grown nearby, and therefore the acreage liable to be burned each year. Instead, the numbers are moving in the opposite direction. The political obstacles to changing that are formidable. The last serious attempt to overhaul India’s agricultural system, in 2020, brought farmers from the northern states onto the streets around the capital for a year, until the government eventually backed down.

That is the trap. Officials keep reaching for technological fixes because the underlying political problem is so difficult to confront, but the metric that matters is not how many fires satellites detect or how many seeders governments distribute. It is how much paddy farmers plant. Until that acreage starts shrinking, no amount of technology will clear Delhi’s skies.

David Fickling is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering climate change and energy. Previously, he worked for Bloomberg News, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. This column reflects the personal views of the author and does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.