# **Appendices For Online Publication**

## **Appendix 1 Additional Background Discussion**

### **Appendix 1.1 Fires & Agriculture**

Fire has been used by humans to manage landscapes for at least 40,000 years (Pyne and Goldammer, 1997) and in the cultivation of corn for at least 5,000 years (Rue et al., 2002). Sediment cores indicate that fire was used to manage agricultural fields in India at least 600 years ago (Morrison, 1994). The use of fires in agriculture is still widespread today in both developed and developing countries. Historically fires were used to clear land for planting in a swidden (“slash-and-burn”) style of agriculture and its use evolved over time to include preparing fields for harvest and clearing residue to prepare fields for re-planting (Pyne, 2019).

Analysis of satellite imagery suggests that globally there are roughly 1.5 million fires annually with the largest number in Russia (Korontzi et al., 2006). The widespread use of fires in Russia, Eastern Europe (namely Ukraine) and North America mean that in absolute terms fire use in agriculture is more common in the developed world than the developing world (Cassou, 2018). On a per hectare basis, however, African countries are the most frequent users of fire. This is in part due to declines in recent years in the use of fires in North America and the European Union (Marlon et al., 2008), driven in part by increasing regulation around the practice. It should be noted, however, that the use of fires to clear crop residue was widespread in California and Western Canada until the mid-1990s when increasing concerns over air pollution led to regulation to eliminate the practice (Cassou, 2018).

Frequent and long-term use of crop residue burning may decrease the productivity of agricultural land (Smil, 1999; Vasilica et al., 2014; Sawyer, 2019; Prasad et al., 1999; Mandal et al., 2004). It does so by destroying micro-nutrients in the soil and removing valuable fertilizer including nitrogen and phosphorus. Others have argued, however, that the extent to which burning negatively impacts soil quality is highly dependent on the type of soil. Further, farmers who shift from a production process that includes burning to one that removes residue from the field without burning may suffer short-term yield losses if they fail to adjust their use of fertilizer as well (Jain et al., 2014; Bhargava, 2014).

### **Appendix 1.2 MNREGA Details**

The MNREGA program is the latest in a succession of work-based anti-poverty programs in India dating back to at least the British Raj (Imbert and Papp, 2015). The most notable program prior to MNREGA was the Maharashtra Employment Guarantee Scheme (MEGS) introduced in 1977 by the Government of Maharashtra (Shah and Mehta, 2008). MEGS was not a national program but much of the design of MEGS was incorporated into MNREGA. Like MNREGA the aim of MEGS was to provide employment to rural residents, focused on labor-intensive work, and targeted the formation of public goods. The number of person-days of work that it generated reached an early peak in 1980 and declined through the 1990s before climbing again through the early 2000s. Variation in the number of person-days supplied through MEGS appears to be tied to changes in the wage schedule and declines in the level of activist support for the program (Shah and Mehta, 2008). Of particular relevance to this study and MNREGA, estimates suggest that MEGS increased agricultural labor wages by around 18%(Gaiha, 1997).

After independence, the national government experimented with a number of national rural workfare programs. A series of small-scale and pilot programs in the 1960s and 1970s were rolled into 48