Punjab's air quality problem has three separate components and they are usually collapsed into one.
The first is the November stubble smoke, which is seasonal, visible from satellites, and contributes to the northern plain's winter emergency along with meteorology, transport and industry.
The second is industrial and is year-round: Mandi Gobindgarh's steel, Ludhiana's electroplating and dyeing, brick kilns everywhere.
The third is domestic and rural: biomass burning for cooking and heating, which is the largest household air pollution source in rural India and kills more people than either of the others.
The national argument each November is about the first, which is the one Punjabi farmers can be blamed for. The other two are continuous, are nobody's photograph, and are not discussed.
The measurement infrastructure is the first problem. Punjab has a small number of continuous monitoring stations, almost all of them in cities, and the rural districts where most of the burning happens have none. The satellite fire counts are precise and the ground level exposure figures are largely modelled.
The health cost falls where the sources are. Ludhiana's industrial belt and Mandi Gobindgarh's furnaces expose the same workers all year that the November smoke exposes for three weeks, and the year round exposure is the larger number and gets none of the attention.
The policy response has concentrated almost entirely on stubble, through machinery subsidy, penalties on farmers and satellite enforcement. Industrial emission enforcement over the same period has been weak and is not reported publicly at the plant level.