Jhang’s district administration has moved from warnings to cases in its fight against smog, after a raid caught crop residue burning in progress in a village on the edge of the district’s main farming belt.
Additional Deputy Commissioner (Enforcement) Rab Nawaz Chadhar visited Pabbar Wala, in the Chund Bharwana area, on Friday accompanied by officers of the Agriculture Department. Burning was under way when the team arrived. The ADC ordered a case to be registered against those found responsible at the spot for violating the anti-smog laws, and directed the officers with him to take immediate legal action.
The visit was a field check, not a meeting-room announcement. The ADC took notice of the burning himself and told the departments concerned to act at once. His message was direct: the ban on burning crop residue is complete, and action against violators will be taken without discrimination.
Speaking during the visit, the ADC said every department concerned must play its part if Jhang is to be free of smog, and he asked citizens to play their own role in preventing environmental pollution. The appeal matters because crop burning is not a problem the administration can police field by field on its own. It needs farmers to stop setting fire to residue, and it needs the agriculture teams who work with those farmers to be in the fields alongside the enforcement officers.
The raid follows the district’s wider anti-smog drive, which the Deputy Commissioner stepped up on Friday, ordering action against brick kilns operating outside the zigzag technology rules, against crop burning, and against smoke-emitting vehicles. That drive is itself a response to air that has been among the worst in Punjab this week. Jhang topped the province’s air pollution chart on Friday with an air quality index of 678, a figure in the hazardous range. By Saturday morning the index had improved sharply to 155, still unhealthy, but the improvement underlines how quickly the air can turn when burning and emissions pile up together.
The scale of the problem is not a matter of a few fields. Satellite data analysed from NASA’s fire detection system recorded 676 crop-fire detections in Jhang between 1 and 29 October, part of 13,241 across Punjab in the same period, as reported by Dawn. The Punjab Environment Protection Agency’s enforcement figures for 28 September to 27 October show the same pressure: 11,580 brick kilns inspected, 197 non-compliant kilns demolished, 163 units sealed and 162 cases registered, with fines totalling Rs40.7 million.
The timing is no accident. The wheat-sowing window for irrigated areas runs from 1 to 20 November, and the rice harvest leaves large amounts of stubble in the fields. Farmers clearing land for wheat are under pressure to move quickly, and burning is the fastest way to clear a field. A ten-day wheat awareness campaign, run by the University of Agriculture Faisalabad with the Agriculture Extension Department, is also in the field until 8 November, pressing for timely sowing with certified seed.
What the raid does not settle is how far this particular case will go. The report of the visit does not name the people against whom the case was ordered, does not say how many were involved, and does not confirm that the first information report had actually been registered by the time the report was published. What it establishes is the order itself, the place, and the fact that the burning was found in progress. Readers should not read more into it than that: an enforcement order made on the spot, in a district where the administration has said plainly that burning will now draw legal action.
For farmers in Chund Bharwana and across the district, the practical message is the one the ADC gave at the field: the ban is in force, the teams are visiting villages rather than waiting for complaints, and a case can follow a visit. The test in the coming days will be whether the orders given at Pabbar Wala are followed by registered cases and cleaner air.
Source: The Jhang Times, “ADC (Enforcement) Rab Nawaz Chadhar’s raid in Chund Bharwana; order to register FIR against those responsible for burning crop residue”, published 6 November 2026.
