Pay-for-results machinery model spurs drop in farm fires in Punjab

Chandigarh: Stubble burning has recorded a sharp fall in Punjab in recent years, yet the limited availability of crop residue management (CRM) machinery during the paddy harvesting season remains a challenge.To bridge this gap, The Nature Conservancy's PRANA (Promoting Regenerative and No-burn Agriculture) — a project launched by The Nature Conservancy as a sustainable farming initiative in north-west India — has promoted an independent service provider framework utilizing a pay-for-results (PfR) financial model.It incentivized local farmers to act as decentralized entrepreneurs, generating income by operating and delivering specialized CRM equipment, such as ‘super-seeders', to other smallholders within their villages. PRANA supplemented these rental earnings with token financial incentives to offset initial operational risks. By mapping the distribution of more than 50,000 CRM machines, the project sought to resolve localized access, timing, and machinery coordination hurdles.This strategic intervention formed the operational backbone of the four-year project, which concluded its 2022–2026 cycle with shifts in regional residue management and water conservation. Aligned with global 2030 targets to address climate, land, and water challenges, the project aimed to remove deep-rooted barriers to sustainable farming.The project data says the initiative engaged 6.5 lakh farmers in Punjab, eliminating farm fires across nearly 8.5 lakh hectares of agricultural land, while its promotion of regenerative agriculture techniques like crop residue management, direct seeding of rice (DSR), and alternate wetting and drying (AWD) conserved an estimated 400 billion litres of water.The initiative scaled up from an initial pilot in 2021. By its third year, PRANA's field footprint covered 18 districts and 6,286 villages across Punjab. To build trust and change mindsets, the project deployed field teams who held over 10,000 farmer meetings and trainings, and utilised 1,900 Kharif and Rabi demonstration plots to enable peer-to-peer learning. Street theatre (nukkad nataks), digital engagement tools, and women-centric community camps were used to spread awareness.Individual interventions were bundled into ‘Improved Rice Management' clusters that integrated CRM machinery with water-saving methods like DSR and AWD. The final phase established around 220 diversification clusters, helping 1,494 farmers transition more than 3,000 acres to alternative, resilient cropping options such as pear-basmati and regenerative cotton.The practical viability of these practices is reflected in individual adoption stories across the state, says the organisation. Harwinder Singh, a paddy farmer from Salah Nagar, adopted AWD after a field demonstration showed him how to track soil moisture using a simple, perforated PVC monitoring pipe. By irrigating only when necessary, Singh cut his irrigation cycles by three to four rounds in his first season. This lowered his farm's electricity consumption, improved crop health, and naturally suppressed Brown Plant Hopper infestations that had previously required heavy chemical treatments.Swati Bora, global director for Regenerative Food Systems at TNC said, "The PRANA initiative has shown that sustainable agricultural transitions happen not simply through new technologies, but through the systems that help farmers adopt them with confidence. We have seen encouraging progress in the uptake of no-burn practices, but perhaps the most important lesson is that farmers are willing to change when they have access to trusted advice, reliable services, practical solutions, and strong partnerships that work within the realities of farming."However, project learnings indicate that the transition has been neither uniform nor complete. Evidence suggests that Punjab is now entering a new phase where the central challenge is no longer only awareness or initial adoption, but whether farmers can implement no-burn practices reliably, confidently, affordably, and within narrow operational windows.While many farmers have adopted CRM-related technologies or services, implementation was often partial, improvised, or operationally adapted to local risk conditions. This explains why complete burning reduced sharply while partial burning continued to persist across many areas.Faced with these constraints, farmers increasingly appear to be shifting toward hybrid residue-management pathways that balance operational feasibility, agronomic confidence, machinery access, and sowing timelines rather than transitioning directly from complete burning to mulching or soil incorporation.