New Delhi: More than 90 per cent of large farm fires in Punjab and Haryana are now going undetected by the official monitoring systems as farmers are shifting stubble-burning activities to late afternoons, according to a new analysis published on Monday.

The Stubble Burning Status Report 2025 by the International Forum for Environment, Sustainability and Technology (iFOREST) said this led to major underestimation of the contribution of stubble burning to Delhi's air pollution this year.

iFOREST said the government's current monitoring protocol, run by the Consortium for Research on Agroecosystem Monitoring and Modeling from Space (CREAMS) of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute, is unable to detect most farm fires as it relies mainly on polar-orbiting satellites that observe India

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