The fire count collapsed. The smog did not

This is the second of a three-part story. Punjab's crop-fire detections fell 93 per cent in five seasons. Delhi's worst days eased; its everyday autumn air did not. And the counted burning moved to the states next door.

Monsoons are pulling back from Punjab. Paddy is harvested through October. Wheat replaces it after. In between, winds over northern India lose their summer push, swing in from the north-west and slow down, and whatever is in the air over Punjab and Haryana begins to drift toward Delhi and sit there.

That is the sequence Delhi has been told to blame for a decade of unbreathable winters. This year, the sequence has broken.

Satellites recorded 5,114 crop fires in Punjab in the 2025 rice season, from September 15 to November 30, according to daily bulletins published by the Indian Agricultural Research Institute. In 2021, 71,304 were recorded. That is a fall of about 93 per cent in five seasons. Every season since 2021 has come in lower than the one before.

But Delhi's air did not follow.

Over the same five autumns, the city's average air quality index for the October 1–November 30 period rose from 273 in 2021 to 288 in 2025, according to Central Pollution Control Board readings. The cleanest of the five was 2022, at 264, a season in which Punjab recorded 49,922 fire detections, ten times what it recorded last year.

The worst days did ease. In 2021, Delhi logged 11 days above 400 AQI, the "severe" band. It was three in 2025. Across the full year, the improvement is clearer still: the Commission for Air Quality Management puts Delhi's January-to-November average at 187 in 2025 against 197 in 2021, reportedly its best such stretch since 2018.

It is the everyday bad days that did not shift. Seen across a whole year, the burning season is a spike on a line that never drops to clean.

This year has not broken the pattern either. Between January 1 and September 13, Delhi averaged an AQI of 172. This was 166 over the same days of 2025. This year, we saw 19 days above 300 AQI, compared to last year's 17. Two days this January exceeded 400, on January 18 and 19. The same stretch of 2025 never crossed it.

On both measures, 2026 fared marginally worse. The burning season, where the years will actually diverge, is still ahead of both.

HOW MUCH OF IT IS STUBBLE

For years, the honest answer to "how much of Delhi's winter air is stubble-burning?" was that nobody could say. That gap has narrowed, and the answer is smaller than the argument suggests.

The Central Pollution Control Board, replying to a Right to Information request from environmental activist Amit Gupta, reportedly put stubble burning's contribution to Delhi's PM2.5 at 3.5 per cent from October to December 2025, down from 13 per cent in 2021.

The reply confirmed the board still leaned on a 2018 study by The Energy and Resources Institute and the Automotive Research Association of India, which worked out how much of Delhi's pollution comes from where, for every other source — an eight-year-old picture of a city that has changed.

But three months is a long average. Over October and November alone, the Centre for Science and Environment put the mean near four per cent and the single worst day near 22. Stubble-burning is a bit player most days and a leading one on a few.

THE BURNING DID NOT STOP — IT MOVED

The story Delhi tells itself is about Punjab. The data, however, is no longer about the state.

While fires in Punjab fell 93 per cent, detections in the five other states the bulletins cover — Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Delhi — rose 35 per cent, from 20,743 to 27,914. Almost all of that rise is in Madhya Pradesh, which has climbed every season from 8,160 to 17,067 and now records more detections than any of the six. Uttar Pradesh is second at 7,290. Punjab is third.

Seen from above, the two months before Delhi's smog season are not one story but several: a dense band across Punjab, a thinner scatter through Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, and a separate cluster in Madhya Pradesh, hundreds of kilometres from the capital.

Punjab's share of all detections across the six states has gone from 77.5 per cent to 15.5 per cent. The shape of its season has not changed: every one of the five rises through October and peaks in November. There is simply far less of it.

WHY THIS LANDS NOW

Punjab votes within months. Bhagwant Mann's Aam Aadmi Party government took office on March 16, 2022, and its five-year term runs to February 2027. The Bharatiya Janata Party has governed Delhi since February 2025, when it took 48 of the capital's 70 seats. The two governments that argue every winter about Punjab's smoke are now led by different political parties — and one of them faces the voters first.

The 2022 season, the first under the new government, is when Punjab's fall in fire detections began. That is a coincidence in time and nothing more. Burning also answers to monsoon withdrawal, paddy variety, harvest timing, machinery subsidies and pressure from the courts, all of which were changing in the same years. And the last of the five seasons was Punjab's worst flood in decades, which damaged 1.48 lakh hectares of standing crop: under five per cent of the paddy area, but a real downward push on any 2025 figure.

The number cuts against both sides. It cuts against the claim that Punjab is why Delhi cannot breathe. It cuts equally against any claim that Punjab's collapse has fixed Delhi's winter.

And it may not mean what either side thinks. The season starting on September 15 will be argued over on that number, for the last time. On September 3, the Commission for Air Quality Management in the National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas said it would stop counting fires and start measuring the ground they burn.

- Ends