Gurdwaras Help Tackle India’s Environmental And Agriculture Crises
DELHI — Every October, as Punjab’s rice harvest winds down, a familiar orange glow spreads across the state's fields at dusk.
Farmers set fire to the stubble left behind after harvest to clear their fields, and within days a thick grey haze rolls over north India, choking Delhi and the National Capital Region in one of the most predictable and most stubborn environmental crises in the country.
In 2020 alone, Punjab recorded nearly 80,000 stubble-burning incidents in a single season, with more than half the state's paddy area, or rice fields, going up in smoke.
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For years, the policy response followed a familiar script: bans, fines, subsidized machinery, and public awareness campaigns. And for years, the fires kept returning.
For Dhananjay Kumar, program manager at Manav Vikas Sansthan, which runs a campaign against stubble burning across Punjab, the reason was simple: Farmers were not burning fields out of ignorance about the harm it caused — they were burning because it was what they had always seen done.
“It’s a behavioral issue,” Kumar told Religion Unplugged.
That diagnosis is what pushed MVS toward an approach few environmental campaigns have tried at this scale: recruiting religious institutions as messengers.
Working across India’s northwestern state of Punjab, Himachal Pradesh and Haryana, MVS’s campaign combines crop residue management, water-saving irrigation and soil health work with a grassroots communications strategy rooted in local trust by using local gurdwaras as messengers.
The results, drawn from government data, have been striking. Fire incidents in Punjab fell by more than 90 percent, from close to 80,000 in 2020 to 5,114 by 2025. Kumar, who manages the campaign day-to-day, points to one factor as central to that shift: Faith.
Why demonstration plots weren’t enough
MVS’s campaign began, as many agricultural interventions do, with demonstration plots — fields where the organization's technical experts showed farmers, side by side, the difference between burning stubble and alternatives like no-burn residue management, alternate wetting and drying and direct-seeded rice.
Field days were organized just before harvest, so farmers from neighboring villages could see the results and discuss the challenges — pest pressure, unfamiliar equipment, changes in yield — directly with technical experts and each other.
But Kumar said the plots alone did not translate into village-wide change. When MVS looked into why, the team concluded it had been treating the problem as a purely economic and technical one, without addressing the underlying behavior.
“We realized the behavioral side wasn't being touched,” Kumar said, describing generations of farmers who grew up watching their fields being set alight after harvest, and who saw it as simply how the land was cleared.
Convincing individual farmers with data and demonstration plots was not enough, Kumar added, to break a habit passed down through families and communities.
That realization led MVS to what Kumar described as a wider strategy — one built on the idea that lasting change needed community backing and legitimacy, not just technical proof. The campaign turned to Punjab's village institutions: local governments, called panchayats, and gurudwaras, which already served as trusted hubs for community announcements.
Gurdwara, a place of assembly and worship in Sikhism, had long used their public address systems for water-related announcements. MVS built on that existing channel. They tied messages about soil, water and no-burn agriculture to sacred teachings about water and its meaning for the village's future generations.
Kumar said the campaign has also linked its push for crop diversification to Sikh teachings on the importance of trees. They connected practices that farmers already associate with religious values to the specific behaviors the campaign wants to encourage. MVS prepares the scripts, and gurudwara committees then broadcast them to every household within earshot.
Street theatre, schools and the women in the room
Alongside the temple announcements, MVS uses street plays — nukkad natak — staged in village gathering spots, reaching audiences that formal meetings and large camps often miss. Kumar said MVS deliberately moved away from camps of 40 to 50 farmers, where individual voices carry little weight, toward smaller village-level meetings of around ten farmers, where peer influence is stronger.
Women, who own a small share of agricultural landholdings in Punjab but are deeply involved in household and farm decisions, became a deliberate focus. MVS holds women-centric camps addressing water-related concerns — from the rising cost of pumping groundwater from ever-deeper wells to the health impact of pesticide overuse — issues that hit family finances directly.
Kumar said these conversations were designed to travel home, prompting exactly the kind of household discussion the campaign was missing.
Schools became another channel. MVS runs drawing and poster competitions and mural projects with children on the effects of stubble burning, hoping that a child’s poster leads to conversations at home, giving the message an added layer of legitimacy that outside experts cannot always provide on their own.
The economics pushing farmers to change
Behind the spiritual messaging, Kumar pointed to a harder economic reality that has made MVS’s case easier to make over time: Punjab's groundwater is running out.
He cited research from Punjab Agricultural University pointing to a long-term desertification trend in the state, driven in large part by paddy's heavy water demands.
As the water table drops, farmers must drill borewells deeper each year, raising diesel and electricity costs simply to keep irrigating the same land. That rising input cost, Kumar said, has become as persuasive an argument against continuing with rice-heavy, burn-and-replant cycles.
Crop diversification, one of MVS’s three core goals alongside water conservation and ending stubble burning, is meant to ease that pressure by encouraging farmers to move away from a single water-intensive crop.
But Kumar was frank about how uneven that shift has been. Smaller farmers, who may hold just a few acres, often cannot diversify in practice: There is little local market to absorb small quantities of vegetables like carrots or tomatoes, leaving them dependent on rice and wheat even when they understand the water costs.
Larger landholders have more room to experiment with alternative crops, but for most of Punjab's smallholders, Kumar said, diversification remains aspirational rather than achievable without stronger market linkages.
MVS has tried to fold this economic argument for crop diversification with spiritual lessons, pairing the language of financial survival with the language of stewardship, so that farmers hear the same message reinforced from multiple directions.
A model beyond one campaign
MVS's stubble-burning work is one strand of a broader portfolio; the organization partners with a range of corporate and philanthropic funders on separate initiatives spanning water restoration, women's empowerment and rural livelihoods across the three states where it operates.
But Kumar's account of the stubble-burning campaign points to a more transferable lesson: That Sikh temples, panchayats and schools already carry a kind of trust that outside experts and government messaging often struggle to earn — and that trust can be mobilized for environmental behavior change well beyond a single season's fires.
For Delhi, whose winter air quality crisis is inseparable from what happens in Punjab’s fields each October, that lesson carries direct and urgent relevance. It suggests that solving the region's pollution problem may depend as much on gurdwaras, street theatre and children's classrooms as it does on bans, sensors and enforcement.
Rishabh Jain is an independent journalist based in Delhi. Follow him at @ThisIsRjain.