The Political Composition of Clean Air
Leadership identity alters the incentives around stubble burning, producing environmental gains that extend well beyond constituency lines
Maulik Jagnani: The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Tufts University
Meera Mahadevan: The School of Global Policy and Strategy, University of California, San Diego
SDG 3: Good Health and Well-Being | SDG 5: Gender Equality | SDG 13: Climate Action
Ministry of Environment, Forest and Climate Change | Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers’ Welfare
India’s air-pollution debate swings between helplessness (“it’s the weather”) and anger at farmers who burn stubble each winter. Both explanations reveal frustration, but neither explains what actually shifts behaviour in a political system that looks disconcerted as the air turns toxic.
Electoral data for the last two-decade points to a different answer, one that turns less on technology or subsidies than on who holds power.
Across state assemblies, when a woman politician narrowly wins a constituency, crop fires fall by 13 percent. In districts that rotate between rice–wheat or sugarcane, the drop reaches 21 percent. Peak particulate emissions – the sharp bursts that push North India into emergency zones – fall by 40 percent. This is not correlation; women leaders take crop fires more seriously, especially because they care more about the health risks to children.
A Crisis Made of Small Choices
Most farm fires come from predictable behaviour. Burning residue is cheap, fast and rational when alternatives require labour, time or expensive machinery. Farmers recognise the health harms, but incentives push them toward fire.
Realigning incentives depends on steady administrative attention and a willingness to break from entrenched interests – features that vary systematically with who occupies political office. This is where the gender identity of the elected leader begins to matter.
In a survey of 424 village leaders in Punjab, women, more often than men, described stubble-burning as “very serious,” emphasising child-health impacts, supporting enforcement and knowing the penalties and residue-management schemes already on the books. These shifts in belief are modest, but when held by a legislator with budgetary influence and administrative visibility, they scale.
Women MLAs appear more willing to push district officials, fund residue-collection, and back alternatives such as baling, fodder use or private pick-up – interventions that reduce burning without punishing farmers. They also signal how sensitive pollution is to administrative effort: a few weeks of sustained monitoring in October prevents an entire season of toxic spikes.
Women leaders diverge not because they care more about the environment, but because children’s health becomes the frame through which they set their governance priorities.
The Downwind Dividend, and the Asymmetry
The most striking effects unfold beyond the constituency itself. When a woman legislator wins, downwind districts – far outside her constituency – also benefit.
In these areas, reductions in peak particulate is 30 percent on an average. These spillover gains are nearly twice the improvement inside her own constituency, underscoring that representation has the character of a public good rather than a local gender-political asset. If one woman’s electoral victory improves air quality in multiple constituencies, the case for stronger representation becomes developmental, not symbolic.
A clear asymmetry also emerges: the largest gains occur when women are newly elected, while constituencies that re-elect women show smaller or insignificant additional reductions. This does not indicate that women become less effective in later terms; rather, these constituencies begin from substantially cleaner baselines and have already absorbed the most immediate, high-impact interventions in the first term. Subsequent reductions require deeper structural changes that are harder to deliver within existing political and administrative constraints. The pattern suggests that women’s entry into office is the moment when governance priorities shift most visibly, because both need and opportunity are greatest at that point - not because their influence fades thereafter.
The Pivot for India’s Governance Debate
India is spending billions on pollution control – smog towers, bio-decomposers, mechanised residue collection, crop-diversification plans. These programmes are costly, politically fraught and unevenly implemented.
A 13 percent fall in farm fires from electing a woman MLA is comparable to India’s strongest bureaucratic incentive reforms and some of the most effective payments-for-ecosystem-services programmes – and it achieves this without substantial fiscal outlays. The shift comes from different political priorities, not new technology.
Representation is the deeper take. Women leaders tend to weigh the health costs of crop fires – particularly for children – more heavily than the demands of organised interests, shifting how the problem is framed and acted upon. The evidence does not suggest women are “cleaner” or more virtuous; it suggests their lived experience – especially caregiving – shapes how they perceive risk. And policy follows perception.
The Road Ahead
Three implications stand out.
First, treat women’s representation as environmental policy. Gender quotas – long debated for fairness – now have an additional rationale: they produce material gains in governance. As India moves toward 33 percent reservation in legislatures, cleaner air may emerge as one of the earliest benefits.
Second, strengthen enforcement chains around leaders willing to act. Women MLAs seem to enforce existing rules more consistently. Targeted district support, flexible funds and residue-collection pilots can amplify their impact.
Third, shift the narrative on stubble-burning from “farmers versus cities” to “governance versus inertia.” When leaders treat crop fires seriously, farmers adjust. Behaviour moves fast when the state’s intent is unambiguous.
In a system where enforcement is uneven and public health is frequently sidelined, women’s victories create space for a governance orientation India urgently needs. The message is clear: when the composition of power changes, so does the quality of the air. Representation is policy – measurably so.
Authors:
The discussion in this article is based on the authors’ research published in the Journal of Public Economics (Volume 248). Views are personal.