Each autumn, a familiar script returns. Delhi’s air turns toxic, television crews travel to Punjab, satellite images of burning fields fill the screens, and the Punjabi farmer becomes the face of northern India’s winter smog. The smoke is real, and stubble burning does worsen early winter pollution. But a regional air pollution problem is repeatedly reduced to the image of a farmer setting a field on fire.

The picture is complicated by the numbers. According to the Commission for Air Quality Management, Punjab’s officially recorded paddy stubble fire events fell from 71,304 in 2021 to 5,114 in 2025, a decline of about 93 per cent. These are satellite-detected events under the standard ISRO monitoring protocol, not a measure of how much stubble was burnt or how much pollution reached Delhi. Even so, the decline is substantial. Farmers’ practices have changed, although the figures alone cannot tell us which intervention made the difference.

This does not excuse burning.…