Another alternative to crop burning, Mr. Lal and the farmers said, would be to create a market for the excess straw. So far, seven power plants that generate electricity from straw have been built in Punjab, and six more are on the drawing board.

But together, all 13 would consume only 1.5 million of the 20 million tons of straw produced in Punjab every year, or less than 10 percent, said Polash Mukerjee, a researcher at the Center for Science and Environment, a New Delhi research and advocacy group, who also assists Mr. Lal’s environmental authority. That is not enough to create a market for the straw, so it would still cost farmers far more to gather it and bring it to the plant than to burn it in their fields.

“If the government paid me for my straw, I’d stop burning it today,” said Shabaz Singh, 32, who grows 25 acres of rice and wheat in Maulviwala.

The burning of crops was outlawed some time ago. But, like many laws in India, it is widely ignored. Certainly, none of the farmers feared being hit with fines that are supposed to range from $38 to $225.

“If the government wants to stop it, it can stop it,” said Harjinder Singh, a father of two school-age children from Duttal village, who was the only farmer I met on my visit who said he did not intend to burn his crop. “But the government lacks the will to do so.”

Mr. Singh and his brother, Narinder Singh, 38, were riding on a tractor pulling the Happy Seeder device when I stopped by their 12-acre farm last week. They used a government subsidy to cover half of the cost of the device, and paid about $950 themselves.

It has worked well for them in the three years since they bought it, the brothers said. Not only did they avoid burning their straw, they said, but their yields of both wheat and rice went up, suggesting that leaving the straw on the ground instead of burning it was improving the fertility of the soil.