Punjab produces roughly twenty million tonnes of paddy straw a year and burns most of it in a three-week window.
The alternatives exist and are technically proven: biomass power plants, compressed biogas, biochar, board and paper manufacture, animal fodder after treatment, mushroom cultivation substrate, and incorporation into the soil with a Happy Seeder.
The obstacles are logistics and time. Straw is bulky, low in value per tonne, and must be collected in the same three weeks the field is needed for wheat. Baling, transport and storage cost more than the material is worth without a subsidy or an assured buyer.
Compressed biogas plants have been built in Punjab and the largest of them consume a small fraction of the annual straw.
The scale required is very large. Absorbing Punjab's paddy straw would need an industry comparable in size to its existing agro-processing sector, built for a three-week harvest.
It is a solvable engineering and logistics problem that has been described as urgent every November for twenty years.
The Happy Seeder drills wheat straight through standing stubble without clearing it, which removes the reason to burn. It has been subsidised for over a decade and the acreage under it is still a minority of the state.
A biomass plant needs a supply for eleven months and the material exists for three, so it either stores a year of fuel on site or runs at a fraction of capacity. That storage cost is what kills most proposals on paper.
The economics fail at collection. Straw is bulky, low value and available for three weeks, and nobody has built the logistics that would make it a raw material rather than a nuisance.
Punjab Pollution Control Board and agriculture department records on residue management.