At first, 16-year-old Sk Reezaal Arafat thought someone near his home in Medinipur, West Bengal, was burning rubbish. For the past two winters, he had been noticing tiny particles of ash floating in the air and settling around his house.

He had grown up hearing about Delhi's ‘gas chamber’ winters and the smoke caused by farmers burning leftover crop waste in Punjab and Haryana. But he had never expected to come across the same problem so close to home.

When he began looking into where the ash was coming from, he discovered that farmers in his own district were setting fire to the stalks left behind after harvesting their crops.

It bothered him. Why were farmers still burning their crop waste when the smoke was affecting people living nearby? And what would it take to stop it?

As Reezaal would soon discover, the answer was far from simple.

Why farmers were burning their fields

The first thing Reezaal learnt was how much it could cost farmers to avoid burning.

Clearing just one bigha of farmland by hand could cost around Rs 600, while burning the leftover stalks cost almost nothing. And with another crop to plant, farmers often had very little time to get their fields ready.

Unpredictable weather was making things harder. Machines had made harvesting faster, but many farmers still didn't have access to the equipment needed to clear the waste left behind. Other options, such as products that help the stalks break down naturally, could take time to arrive and even longer to work.

For a farmer worried about the cost of clearing a field and getting the next crop planted on time, burning was often the easiest way out.

But Reezaal noticed another problem. By the time someone spotted a fire, reported it and the authorities could respond, the damage had already been done. The smoke had spread, and families living nearby were left breathing it in.

He began to wonder why everyone was trying to deal with the fires after they had started.

What if farmers could get the help they needed before they reached for a match?

How SATARK looks for warning signs before a fire

That question led to SATARK, a climate-tech initiative Reezaal started in December 2025. Today, he leads a team made up mostly of student volunteers aged 15 to 18, with a network of over 30 ‘Student Guardians’ helping connect the initiative with farmers. He began building it while still in school, juggling field visits, coding and research calls alongside his board exam preparation.

SATARK aims to identify where crop waste is likely to be burned and help authorities reach farmers with alternatives before they resort to setting their fields on fire.

But Reezaal first had to understand why existing systems were missing some of these fires.

Satellites can spot fires from space, but they don't always catch everything. Some pass over an area only at fixed times, so fires that burn for a short while or happen late at night........

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