RAKESH BAKSHI via Getty Images TOPSHOT - An Indian villager walks in a field on a foggy morning on the outskirts of Jammu on January 31, 2018. / AFP PHOTO / Rakesh BAKSHI (Photo credit should read RAKESH BAKSHI/AFP/Getty Images)

JALANDHAR, Punjab—Each year, the air quality in rural India deteriorates after paddy is harvested. While Delhi's Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal is at loggerheads with the Punjab Chief minister Captain Amarinder Singh and also with Haryana as stubble burning in those states contributes to Delhi's air pollution woes, the fact is that we don't have any way of tracking the pollution in villages, and don't know how bad the crisis is, outside of the bigger cities.

The Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) does not have any mechanism to record the AQI in villages as it believes that pollution is rural areas is not 'significant' enough to be monitored on daily basis.

"Pollution in urban areas is much serious and alarming as compared to rural areas due to high population density and also the nature of pollutants. However in villages, it is still a periodical concern only that mostly happens during harvesting season," said Dr Prashant Gargava, Member Secretary, CPCB.

To record the national Air Quality Index, CPCB records data from air monitoring stations installed in 307 cities, and it doesn't have any single monitoring mechanism in rural areas, even in Punjab, Haryana, and Rajasthan, where stubble burning is done for at least two to three months every year.

Even brick kilns and rapid urbanisation of rural areas in the last few years also failed to draw attention of the CPCB authorities towards the pollution levels soaring high in rural India.

At present, except Punjab which has High Volume Samples (HVS) machines to be used manually, and no other state has got any mechanism so far to check air pollution in rural areas. However, even those need . to be upgraded as per the parameters of the national air quality index.

Also while the last few weeks saw many villages of Punjab and Haryana remained engulfed in thick smog, an activity also experienced by lakhs of commuters driving on the national highway 1A connecting Delhi—Amritsar, CPCB data claims that Air Quality Index (AQI) in Punjab has 'greatly' improved since the last two years.

As per AQI recorded in all the six air monitoring stations in Punjab on November 6 at 7 am, the reports were found to be between 'good' and 'moderate'.

While the AQI in Ludhiana, the industrial capital of the state was recorded at 118 which was 'moderate'. In Amritsar, it was found to be 61. Bathinda and Jalandhar have AQI at 125 and 159, and the AQI in the top two industrial townships of Khanna and Mandi Gobindgarh was 146 and 127 at the time of writing. However, there's no clear data on how people suffer in rural areas.

How serious is the pollution problem in rural Punjab?

On October 28 this year, when Prime Minister Narendra Modi praised a Nabha based farmer Gurbachan Singh in Punjab for spreading awareness against stubble burning in his village Kalar Majri in Nabha tehsil of Patiala, it suddenly caught everyone's attention on social media.

The Prime Minister hailed Singh's decision to get his son only married in a family which does not indulge into the practice of stubble burning.

Majri was one of the village adopted by the Punjab government, where 21 farmers in a village with just 400 acres of land under paddy were waiting to get machinery and financial assistance as promised. Their counterparts in the neighbouring village of Sahauli, with at least 2,000 acres under paddy, have already set their fields on fire.

As per the Punjab Pollution Control Board (PPCB), over 15,000 incidents of stubble burning were reported in the current paddy season. On Nov 5, over 843 stubble burning incidents were reported on a single day.