Stubble Burning Penalties: What a Farmer Actually Owes Under the 2024 Rules

By S&S Co. Advocates & Solicitors · Published 28 October 2026 · Informational content, not legal advice: see our disclaimer

Every October and November, as paddy harvest clears fields across Punjab, Haryana and parts of western Uttar Pradesh, the same cycle repeats: satellite counts of farm fires climb, Delhi's air quality worsens, the Supreme Court takes up the matter again, and state machinery issues red entries against farmers in revenue records. For a farmer actually facing a fine, or an FPO advising its members on what the law requires, the practical questions are simpler than the headlines suggest: how much is the penalty now, who can actually impose it, and how far can enforcement go beyond a monetary fine.

The short answer is that the per-incident fine was doubled in late 2024, landholding size decides how much a given farmer owes, and the Supreme Court spent late 2024 and parts of 2025 saying publicly that the states enforcing this framework are not using even the tools they already have.

The current penalty, by landholding size

That compensation comes from the Commission for Air Quality Management in the National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas, which doubled the environmental compensation payable for stubble burning through an amendment notified on 6 November 2024. Under the revised rates, a farmer with a landholding of less than two acres is liable to pay five thousand rupees per incident of burning crop residue. A farmer holding between two and five acres is liable for ten thousand rupees per incident. A farmer holding more than five acres is liable for thirty thousand rupees per incident.

These figures apply per incident, not as a one-time annual cap, which means a farmer found burning residue on multiple occasions across a season faces the fine being levied again for each separate incident detected. Nodal officers appointed by the governments of Delhi, Punjab, Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh have been authorised to impose and collect this compensation directly from farmers identified as having burnt residue, typically through satellite-detected fire counts cross-checked against land records.

This is an increase from the rates that applied before the 2024 amendment, and farmer unions in Punjab reacted to the revision with open hostility, with at least one union leader publicly stating the increase would not actually be paid regardless of the notified rate. Whatever the politics, the notified figures are the current legal position for environmental compensation purposes, and a farmer or landowner should expect enforcement against the current, doubled rate rather than the older, lower figures still circulating in some older advisory material.

The legal basis: a compensation scheme, not a conviction

The mechanism here is civil in character. It operates through environmental compensation rules notified under the Commission for Air Quality Management in NCR and Adjoining Areas Act, 2021, rather than through a criminal prosecution ending in conviction and sentence. A farmer who pays the notified compensation is not thereby convicted of an offence in the way a criminal prosecution under other environmental statutes would result in; the liability is framed as compensating for environmental harm caused, assessed and collected administratively through the nodal officer mechanism.

This civil framing sits alongside, and is sometimes confused with, a separate and genuinely criminal route under Section 15 of the Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, which the Supreme Court has repeatedly referenced when pressing states to take penal action against farmers and, more pointedly, against officials who fail to enforce the Commission's directions. The Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023 converted much of Section 15's own penalty structure from criminal punishment to a financial-penalty regime enforced by adjudicating officers, with that change taking effect from 1 April 2024, which has complicated rather than simplified how this provision is actually being enforced.

The Supreme Court observed in late 2024 that this amended Section 15 structure cannot function as intended because the adjudicating officers required under Section 15C of the Act to actually impose penalties under the amended scheme had not been put in place by the states, leaving a criminal deterrent on paper with no functioning machinery behind it. The Court was told the necessary machinery would be operationalised shortly, but a farmer or advisor should treat the environmental compensation route under the CAQM framework, not Section 15 of the Environment Protection Act, as the mechanism that is actually being used to collect money from farmers on the ground today.

What the Supreme Court has actually said about enforcement

Through October and November 2024, a bench of the Supreme Court hearing the long-running Delhi air pollution (MC Mehta) matter repeatedly criticised Punjab and Haryana for token enforcement, noting that even as fire counts rose substantially in particular districts, only mild penalties were being collected from farmers found burning residue, and in many cases none at all. The Court's frustration was directed as much at the states' own officials as at farmers; it pointed to the Commission's practice of issuing show-cause notices to officials who failed to act on its directions, rather than prosecuting them under Section 14 of the CAQM Act, which empowers action against non-compliance with the Commission's own orders.

In one hearing the Court went further and raised the prospect of custodial consequences, suggesting that some form of penal provision, potentially including arrest, might need to be reintroduced under the Environment Protection Act framework to make the deterrent credible, given how little the current compensation-based scheme appeared to be changing behaviour in the districts with the worst fire counts. This was a pointed question to the states and the Centre about why existing tools were not being used, not a direction creating a new criminal liability, and should be read that way rather than as an announcement that farmers now face arrest under the law as it stands.

Separately, there have been reports, not yet reflected in any notified rule, that the Centre is considering replacing the Environment Protection Act's own criminal provisions more broadly with a revised civil penalty structure, in the ten-to-fifteen-thousand-rupee range per incident, as part of a wider decriminalisation exercise. Because this remains a reported policy direction rather than a notified amendment, a farmer's current exposure should be assessed against the CAQM's 2024 compensation rates described above, not against a figure attributed to a still-pending reform.

Who can actually come after a farmer, and on what evidence

In practice, enforcement starts with satellite-based fire detection, typically from systems run by central agricultural and remote-sensing bodies, which flag a location and approximate time for a detected fire. That flagged location is then cross-referenced against land records to identify the landholder, and a nodal officer appointed under the state government's arrangement with the Commission issues the demand for environmental compensation based on the landholding-size bracket that applies to that farmer.

A farmer disputing a fine should check, first, whether the land record actually matches the farmer named, since tenancy, joint ownership, and recent sale or inheritance can all create a mismatch between who is recorded as the landholder and who was actually cultivating and burning residue on the flagged parcel at the relevant time. Second, the landholding-size bracket used to calculate the fine should be checked against actual revenue records, since an incorrect bracket, particularly at the boundary between the two-acre and five-acre thresholds, directly changes the amount demanded.

There is, separately, a live and unresolved tension the Supreme Court itself has flagged: the CAQM Act's penal provisions under Section 14 are aimed at non-compliance with the Commission's directions generally and have been used against officials, while the gap in squarely addressing individual farmer liability through a dedicated statutory provision, as opposed to the compensation rules, is something the Court has itself noted as unclear. A farmer facing an unusually aggressive enforcement action, beyond the standard environmental compensation demand, should have that action tested against the specific statutory provision actually being invoked, rather than assume every stubble-burning enforcement step rests on settled legal ground.

What farmers and FPOs should actually be doing about this

Beyond disputing an individual fine, the more durable response for a farmer or an FPO advising its members is managing exposure to the fine in the first place, since the enforcement trend over the last two seasons has clearly been toward more aggressive detection and collection, not less. Central and state schemes subsidising crop residue management machinery, such as happy seeders and balers, exist precisely because the policy preference is for farmers to avoid burning through better equipment access rather than through fines alone, and an FPO in a position to pool machinery access across its members reduces both the air-quality harm and each individual member's fine exposure.

Where a fine has already been levied, paying it under protest while preserving the ability to dispute the landholding bracket or the identification of the landholder is usually more practical than refusing payment outright, since the compensation mechanism is designed for quick administrative collection and a refusal to pay is likely to escalate into a more adversarial enforcement posture rather than a quick resolution.

Given how actively the Supreme Court is currently supervising this entire area, and how frequently both the compensation rates and the underlying statutory machinery have shifted over just the last two years, anyone advising farmers or FPOs on this should treat the current figures and mechanisms as provisional rather than settled, and check the Commission's own current notifications before quoting a specific number to a client.

Frequently Asked Questions

References & Further Reading

The provisions and rulings below were relied on for this guide. The position can change with amendments and later decisions, so check the current text and the latest case law before acting on any of it.

1. Commission for Air Quality Management in National Capital Region and Adjoining Areas Act, 2021, Section 14 (action for non-compliance with Commission directions)
2. Environmental Compensation for Stubble Burning Rules, as amended by CAQM notification dated 6 November 2024 (doubling per-incident compensation rates by landholding size)
3. Environment (Protection) Act, 1986, Section 15 and Section 15C, as amended by the Jan Vishwas (Amendment of Provisions) Act, 2023, effective 1 April 2024