Short Stream | ‘The Stubble’ by Shaz Syed
Amarjit Sharma, a farmer from Faridkot, Punjab, is an outlier among farmers of Punjab. A character in Shah Syed’s journalistic documentary Stubble: The Farmer’s Bane, Sharma is among a minority of organic farmers in Punjab who don’t grow paddy on his farm. He has diverse crops, and he doesn’t burn the stubble of his crops after harvest as the majority of farmers in North Indian states do. In other words, he doesn’t have “yield syndrome”, a term that comes up in the film. From farm to air. Large scale open burning of crop residue, also known as stubble, left after the rice harvest in North Indian states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, takes place during the onset of winter — from October to November. The end of October witnesses peak burning on fields, which is a definitive propeller of the toxic air pollution levels that have worsened over the years in Delhi and its peripheries. Syed’s film offers a startling statistic towards the end of the film: Between October and November of 2022 and …
