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Fire trends

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Fire counts are a floor: satellites miss fires lit and put out between their passes, which is increasingly common. Read with the Two Punjabs report.

Parali ki aag ka har saal ka hisaab: October aur November, 2019 se ab tak, dono Punjab aur Haryana, district ke hisaab se.

Every burning season since 2019

Each line is one season, 1 October to 30 November, when farmers burn rice stubble before sowing wheat. The red line is this year. To compare years fairly, these charts count only what NASA's Suomi NPP satellite saw, because it has flown every year. Newer satellites see more fires, so adding them would make recent years look worse than they are.

Season totals

The dark part of each bar is 1 October up to the latest full day of this season, so you can compare this year with the same dates in earlier years. The light part is the rest of that season.

Where the burning moves

Each bubble is a district, sized by the fire spots all satellites saw there that day. Pick a year and press play to watch a season unfold. Most of the burning is in the two Punjabs: Sangrur, Bathinda, Firozpur and Moga on the Indian side, and Jhang, Okara, Hafizabad, Gujranwala and Nankana Sahib on the Pakistani side.

Day and night

Suomi NPP crosses the region around 1:30 in the afternoon and 1:30 at night. Each bar shows what share of a season's fires it caught on the night pass. That share has grown from about 3% in 2019 to about 8% in 2025. A fire lit at 4 pm that dies down before 1:30 am is missed by both passes, and that is now common: iFOREST, using a satellite that looks every 15 minutes, found over 90% of large farm fires in Indian Punjab in 2024 and 2025 started after 3 pm, against 3% in 2021. So these counts are a floor, not a total, and the fall since 2021 is partly fires the satellites missed. Burnt-area maps show Indian Punjab's burning fell by about a third from 2022 to 2025, not the 90% the counts suggest. Our Two Punjabs report looks at this side by side, and finds no sign of the same shift in Pakistani Punjab.

How this is counted