Saving the land for better use

“Arresting land degradation” was included among the top priorities by the G20 Working Group on Environment and Climate Sustainability in its meeting held in Bengaluru earlier this month. This issue is highly relevant to India, which has to support 18 per cent of the world’s population on only 2.4 per cent land. More worryingly, a sizeable segment of this land has already lost part of its productivity and carrying capacity due to mismanagement and indiscriminate anthropogenic activity, boding ill for the livelihood of a large number of farmers and forest-dwellers. The per capita availability of arable land has shrunk from 0.48 hectare in 1950 to merely 0.16 hectare now. This is much lower than the global average of 0.29 hectare.

Worse still, almost all states have reported an expansion in degraded areas during the past couple of decades, with the most rapid deterioration in land quality being in the biodiversity-rich but ecologically sensitive north-eastern region. Elsewhere, Rajasthan is the most land degradation-prone state — for understandable reasons pertaining to soil and climatic conditions — followed by Maharashtra and Gujarat. No state is, actually, immune to land deterioration due to some factor or the other. The major causes of this are deforestation; wind and water erosion; imprudent alteration of land use; excessive pressure on land beyond its carrying capacity; flawed farm practices; imbalanced use of chemical fertilisers; inadequate application of organic manures; indiscriminate tillage; and mismanagement of many other kinds.

Strangely enough, we do not have a precise idea of how much of the country’s land is actually spoiled by degradation. The estimates vary from less than 100 million hectares (mha) to over 300 mha, depending upon the criteria and methodology used to classify land. Even the assessments of reputed agencies like the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning, and the Space Application Centre (SAC) of the Indian Space Research Organisation differ vastly. While the former has reckoned the extent of degraded land at 147 mha, or 44.7 per cent of the country’s geographical area of 328.87 mha, the latter has put the figure at 96.4 mha, or 29.3 per cent of the area. The National Rainfed Area Authority of India, which sought to reconcile the statistics, arrived at the figure of 121 mha, which amounts to 36.8 per cent of the land mass. It, therefore, seems safe to presume that nearly one-third of the country’s land has become substandard.
 

Thankfully, successive governments at the Centre have neither been unaware of the gravity of this situation nor lacked the will to face the challenge, though whether they did enough to address this issue is open to question. India is among the 123 countries that have committed themselves to achieving land degradation neutrality by 2030. This essentially means upgrading land to a state where it can perform its normal ecological functions and services, including supporting biodiversity, ensuring food security, and meeting other needs. Though India had originally set the target of land restoration at 21 mha, it raised it to 26 mha during the 14th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification, held in 2019.
 

However, ecologists view this goal as easily attainable but too meagre compared to the requirement. Several land improvement-oriented programmes are already underway and are showing some positive results as well. According to a recent report issued by the International Union for Conservation of Nature, India has restored around 9.8 mha of degraded land between 2011 and 2018 — an average rate of reclamation of around 1.4 mha a year. This pace would need to be stepped up only marginally to hit the target of ameliorating 26 mha of degraded land by 2030.
 

But achieving this goal cannot be an end in itself. Huge chunks of land would still remain low-grade even after meeting this target in full. Besides, the task of land restoration would not be deemed complete without ensuring the stability and sustainability of the reclaimed land. At the same time, steps are also needed to safeguard the physical, chemical, and biological health of the existing normal land. However, given the highly positive cost-benefit ratio of land reclamation, this task is worth undertaking. Global experience indicates that the benefits of land restoration can be as high as 10 times the cost of reclamation and ill-effects of land degradation, ranging from the drop in crop yields to out-migration of population. In India, the economic loss due to land degradation and changes in land use pattern was estimated in 2014-15 at Rs 3.17 trillion, equivalent to 2.5 per cent of that year’s gross domestic product. It is, therefore, better to invest in land improvement than incurring such huge and recurring losses. The enduring solution to the menace of land degradation, however, lies in evolving, and meticulously enforcing, a judicious land use policy based on the capability classification of land.

surinder.sud@gmail.com