Degraded andWastelands of India: Status and Spatial Distribution

Abstract

Sustainable agricultural development and food security will be one of the key challenges for India in this century. Around 70% of the India’s population is living in rural area with agriculture as their livelihood support system. The vast majority of Indian farmers are small and marginal. Their farm size is decreasing further due to population growth. And the quality of the land is deteriorating due to heightened nutrient mining, soil erosion, increasing water scarcity, adverse impacts of climate change and accumulation of toxic elements in soil and water. Land degradation, like climate change, is an anthropogenic induced process and poses biggest threat to sustainable livelihood security of the farming communities across the country. All of these factors combined with increased rate of land degradation are contributing towards decline in agricultural productivity leading to food insecurity. Since land resources are finite, requisite measures are required to reclaim degraded and wastelands, so that areas going out of cultivation due to social and economic reasons are replenished by reclaiming these lands and by arresting further loss of production potential. State level and Country level information has already been published by the National Remote Sensing Agency (now NRSC). The first order need of the day, therefore, is to prepare a national degraded and wastelands map down scaled to districts. In addition, the nature and causes of the land degradation, and the degree and extent of damaged lands need to be determined, so that developmental agencies in participation with stakeholders proactively adopt measures to reclaim degraded lands for distancing food insecurity, a real challenge. This book builds-on and integrates work done by different institutes of the ICAR and the Department of Space in the area of degraded and wastelands. It has 11 chapters and chapter wise contents are outlined herewith. Chapter 1 Introduction, narrates problems associated with loss of productivity and soil quality. Centrality of land resources in relation to climate change, environmental concerns and loss of biodiversity are also discussed both in the national and global perspectives. Chapter 2 on Historical Background reviews efforts made over the last half a century by the Ministry of Agriculture, Indian Council of Agricultural Research, National Wasteland Development Board, and the National Remote Sensing Agency (now National Remote Sensing Centre) to classify and map degraded soils and wastelands. This chapter also traces steps taken over the past decade to refine common categories of wastelands in the maps produced by the NRSA and the soil degradation map of the NBSS&LUP. Chapter 3, Geographical Scenario of India defines location, diversity of climates, physiography of the country and their impacts on the development of varied soils, land forms and land use. Chapter 4, Generation of Input Data sets describes data sources for mapping land degradation by incorporating data sets on water erosion, wind erosion, soil acidity and soil salinity generated through collaborative efforts of the ICAR Institutes. Chapter 5, Methodology describes harmonization process developed in the GIS core and followed for obtaining realistic estimates of the degraded and wastelands. Chapter 6, Spatial Distribution of Degraded and Wastelands contains resultant map of the harmonization exercise showing degraded and wastelands of India by various degradation processes. Chapter 7 describes detailed distribution of area of the various categories of degraded and wastelands in 20 AERs. The AER-based data can be used to simulate abiotic stressed land resources availability, use and production potentials. Extent and distribution of degraded and wastelands in different states of India is given in Chapter 8. This chapter contains maps and statistics, state wise and districtwise of the degraded and wastelands. The datasets on the kinds of land degradations, their area and spread are tabulated and mapped. And the land resource inventory is geo-referenced and can be used for launching programmes to rehabilitate and vegetate degraded and wastelands. Chapter 9 discusses severity ranking of different states for different types of degraded lands. Chapter 10 describes scientific and technical relevance of this study. The importance of the data and spatial distribution of the degraded lands across the country in agroecological regions and in states/districts for planning departments is included for implementation of conservation agriculture. Chapter 11 enlists operational use of maps of datasets on degraded and wastelands by various ministries of the Government of India, the NGOs, and by the public institutions at large.