It feels like the end of the world. The light is a livid yellowish-grey. The sun has vanished behind a haze of smoke. Cars are driving with their headlights ablaze at three o’clock in the afternoon. And the earth is on fire.

Indonesia’s fires do not rage through the forests. They sneak through the peat swamps of Kalimantan and Sumatra, invisible at times to both human eye and satellites alike. They dive meters deep into the peat and surface wherever the soil is dry and the wind is strong. They are man-made - started to clear land for small-time farmers and vast commercial palm-oil plantations.

The extraordinary thing is no one seems to care. From Banjarmasin to Palangka Raya in central Kalimantan, a distance of nearly 200km, you are never out of sight of a smouldering fire. There are very few flames, mainly smoke. But farmers are still lighting new fires to clear the land for farming. And there is no sign of an effort to stop.

Four months after the fires began to spread out of control in the midst of a severe drought, large parts of Indonesia’s archipelago are still wrapped in a choking haze. Officials had declared victory after the first rains came last week, but only a full-scale monsoon will extinguish the fires for good. This week officials admitted that the number of hotspots detected by satellite had risen once again.

They counted 53 large fires on Thursday, compared with just 16 last week. In central Kalimantan, government officials admitted fires had burned out two villages in areas where, only days before, they had denied the existence of any danger.

Estimates of the damage range from 100,000ha to 700,000ha, including villages, wildlife reserves, timber concessions and palm oil plantations. Jack Rieley, a peat bog specialist at the University of Nottingham in the UK, estimates that the fires in Indonesia could release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere over the next six months than all the power stations and cars in western Europe emit in a year.

Malaysia, the worst affected of the five neighbouring countries plagued by smoke from Indonesia, has sent more than 1,000 fire-fighters to nearby Sumatra. Australia has lent two water bombers and this week three US military transport aeroplanes were set to arrive, each capable of dropping 3,000 gallons of water per flight.

But there is little evidence that Jakarta has rallied serious resources to battle the flames or that the small-time farmers and large palm-oil plantation owners who began them will change their ways. There are even allegations that the government is partly responsible.

Beyond the ferry at Pulang Pisau, across the Kahayan river, lies the start of “the Project” - brainchild of Indonesia’s President Suharto. It is a huge exercise in human and agricultural engineering, a plan to clear 1m hectares of Borneo’s peat swamps to plant rice and resettle 30,000 farmers from Java and Bali to grow it.

The area, larger than northern Ireland, is almost entirely peat bog, which agronomists say is poorly suited for rice. Vast areas are being cleared along the roadside, by bulldozer and, according to local farmers and environmentalists, also by fire.

“The fires came from the Project,” says one shopkeeper at the side of the road, pointing at blackened fields. “They just let it burn, and then they started clearing the land for the rice fields.”

Sumatra Timur Indonesia and Wijaya Karia, government contractors for the Project, have carved up the territory with canals to drain the swamps and have converted 18,000ha of swamp to rice fields so far. But Sutrisno Ruslan, regional director for public works in Palangka Raya, says the contractors were not responsible for the fires. He blames resettled farmers and local tribespeople. “One transmigrant gets 2ha. Maybe they are too lazy to clear it up and just set it on fire,” he says.

Owners of the palm-oil plantations are even worse, says Mr Ruslan: “They rushed to open new plantations because the price for palm oil is good, and just set the fields on fire. That caused the biggest fires.”

In Palangka Raya, some 50 lecturers and students at the university have set up a volunteer fire-fighting team, equipped with water pumps, hoses and mobile phones. They have discovered that smouldering peat can only be extinguished when inundated with water. It can take days to complete the job.

“The army only has sticks,” says Suwido Limin, the agronomist heading the team. “That is no good. You need gallons of water to stop it.”

He knows that, in the end, the monsoon will solve the problem, though this year, it is feared, heavy rains may not arrive before December. Next year, the problem may be back again. Unless the rules are changed, and the government clamps down on offenders, it could very well be worse.