Punjab has witnessed a record number of 1238 cases of crop residue fire today which has surpassed its entire previous record this season.
Data was collected through the Ludhiana-based Punjab Remote Sensing Data Center reported about the cases late tonight about the number of crop burning residue incidents on Wednesday.
As the winter sets in, the case takes a huge stroll with paddy growers preparing their land for another sowing season by burning the residue after harvesting.
Tarn Taran topped the chart with the maximum number of farm fire cases. The latest data came days later after the center released a record of cases between October 15 – October 22, which showed nearly 3700 cases of farm fire with districts such as Tarn Taran, Amritsar, and Gurdaspur reporting over half of the entire cases in the period.
Punjab: Amritsar's air 'Severe' to breathe; AQI level of 4 major cities depletes post-Diwali
The paddy straw burning in Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Western UP continues to remain a prominent reason behind the menace of air pollution in Northern India, especially in Delhi and NCR.
Crop harvesting got delayed by at least 10 days because of untimely rain in September. Punjab has around 30.84 lakh hectares of paddy area in this Kharif season.
On the data released earlier a Punjab agriculture department official said that paddy harvest is complete in 35% of the total cultivated land in Punjab and the cases will take up in a matter of days. This implies the cases may spike as the season sets in.