Punjab's towns generate several thousand tonnes of solid waste a day and process very little of it. The standard arrangement is collection to a dumping ground at the edge of town, unlined, uncovered and burning.
The dumps at Ludhiana, Jalandhar and Amritsar have been the subject of National Green Tribunal proceedings for years, with directions issued and deadlines missed.
Waste burning at these sites is a significant local air pollution source, year round, and is not part of the November stubble argument at all.
Segregation at source, composting and processing plants have been announced repeatedly and implemented partially.
The waste pickers who do the actual recycling in Punjab's towns are informal, unregistered and largely from migrant and Dalit communities, and they recover a substantial proportion of what is recyclable with no support of any kind.
This is the most visible failure of Punjab's urban governance and the one with the least political cost attached to it.
Almost every town in Punjab has a dump on its edge, unlined, burning periodically, and the leachate goes into the same shallow aquifer the villages around it draw from.
Segregation at source has been mandated for years and is practised in very few places. What separates the waste is the informal sector, working by hand on the dump.
The plastic goes to recyclers, the organic fraction goes nowhere, and construction waste is dumped in fields and in the beds of the seasonal drains.