Essay on Land Degradation as One of the Major Environmental Problems in India

After independence, India launched a series of economic plans for rapid expansion in agriculture, industry, transport, and other infrastructure with a view to increasing production and employment, reducing poverty and inequality of incomes, and establishing a socialist society based on equality and justice. But because of poor planning and in many cases mindless and ruthless exploitation of natural resources, we have degraded our physical environment. Environmental problems have become serious in many parts of the country and can no longer be neglected. Environmental problems in a country are affected by the level of economic development, the availability of natural resources, and the lifestyle of the population. The central question of this paper is what are the key causes of land degradation across typical agroecological regions of India? This present study attempts to understand environmental degradation in India with a special focus on land degradation: its types, causes, and remedies. Then the paper concludes with the whole argument.

What Is Environmental Degradation?

This is a term used to describe a situation in which a part of the natural environment is damaged. It can be used to refer to damage to the land, water, or air. Environmental degradation can also mean a loss of biodiversity and a loss of natural resources in an area. Environmental degradation is not a new thing, it has been happening all over the world for centuries. The problem is that it is now occurring at a much faster rate, therefore not leaving enough time for the environment to recover and regenerate. The greater demands placed on the environment by an ever-increasing human population are putting a great strain and drain on the earth’s limited natural resources. Environmental degradation is a serious threat to the lives of people, animals, and plants, making it imperative that we stop further degradation from occurring.

What Is Land Degradation?

Land is an important natural resource, which provides food, fuel, fodder, and timber to us. Unfortunately, the land has been exploited and abused mercilessly for centuries, resulting in an enhanced rate of land degradation. Land degradation means a loss in the capacity of a given land to support the growth of useful plants on a sustained basis. Land degradation is a big loss to the economy as the land loses its production potential and gets converted into wastelands. Hence shrinking the land resource base is a big problem for developing countries like India. The per capita man land ratio in India is hardly about 0.48 hectares, which is the lowest in the world.

Land degradation poses a considerable challenge to agricultural growth and poverty reduction in India. It is officially estimated that about 44 % of India’s land area is degraded. The causes of land degradation are numerous and complex. Proximate factors include the extension of crop cultivation to marginal and low-potential lands or land vulnerable to natural hazards, improper crop rotations, overuse of agrochemicals, and mismanagement of the irrigation system. Moreover, 'shifting cultivation' practiced in many parts of the country is responsible for deforestation and the expansion of agriculture to less productive lands. However, the underlying causes are believed to be poverty among agricultural households, land fragmentation, insecure land tenure, the open access nature of some resources, and policy and institutional failures.

To illustrate one of these drivers in more detail, India supports 18 % of the world's human population and 15 % of the global livestock population but is endowed with only 2.4 % of the world's land area. Moreover, the average size of land holdings in agriculture declined from 2.30 to 1.16 ha during 1970–2010 due to increasing population pressure. About 60 % of the land is rainfed and low in productivity, leading to high inter-annual fluctuations in agricultural output. About 200 million rural poor depend on these rain-fed areas for their livelihoods.

Types of Land Degradation

Land degradation is categorized into three types: physical degradation, biological degradation, and chemical degradation. Physical degradation refers to deterioration in the physical properties of soil, whereas biological degradation refers to reduction in soil organic matter, decline in biomass carbon, and decrease in activity and diversity of soil fauna. Chemical degradation is basically due to nutrient depletion.

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Extent of Land Degradation

Degraded land includes eroded lands, saline/alkaline lands, water-logged lands, and mined lands. The total land area of India is 329 million hectares, of which about 178 million hectares (54%) are converted into wastelands for one or other reasons. This also includes about 40 million hectares of degraded forest. The total cultivable land of the country is about 144 million hectares, of which 56% (80.6 million hectares) is degraded due to faulty agricultural practices, and dense forest cover has been reduced to 11% (36.2 million hectares) of the total geographical area. Watershed areas, river corridors, and rangelands have been extensively disturbed. The situation is frequently so bad that even cessation of abuse may no longer lead to self-restoration of biological diversity, stability, and productivity of the ecosystems.

In India, about 25% of the land area is suffering from the problem of water erosion. Soil erosion by water in the form of rill and sheet erosion is a serious problem in the red and lateritic soils of South and Eastern India where about 40 tonnes per hectare of topsoil is lost annually. Out of 70 million hectares of the black soils of Central India, about 6.7 million hectares are already unproductive due to the development of gullies. Over 4.4 million hectares of land are degraded due to shifting cultivation, practiced largely by tribals in northeastern India.

Ravines are a system of gullies or gorges worn out by torrents of water running more or less parallel to each other and draining into a major river or its tributaries after a short distance with development or deep and wide gorges. In fact, ravine lands are manifestations of extreme forms of water erosion occupying approximately 3.67 million hectares of land, chiefly distributed in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Gujarat. It has been estimated that the production potential of ravine areas in Uttar Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan alone would amount to 3 million tonnes of food grains annually, besides fruit, fodder, and wood. On a conservative estimate, the country is losing a total output worth about Rs.157 crores a year by failure to reclaim and develop the ravine lands. Furthermore, these ravine lands have been creating problems of law and order maintenance in the states of Uttar Pradesh and Madhya Pradesh as the notorious dacoits take refuge in these eroded lands and conduct their unlawful activities.

Wind erosion is chiefly the problem of arid and semi-arid regions of the country where the soil is sandy with scanty vegetation or even without vegetative cover. In India, about 50 million hectares of land area is affected by wind erosion, most of which belongs to Rajasthan and Gujarat. The over-grazing is the main cause of soil erosion in these areas. It is estimated that a program for the control of wind erosion covering 50 million hectares would cost about 3,000 crores of rupees.

Approximately 140 million hectares of land area of the country is affected by water and soil erosion as a result of which the top fertile layer of the soil is lost annually at the rate of 6,000 million tonnes per year, containing more than Rs.1,000 crores worth of nutrients. The number of macronutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium (N, P & K) lost during this process is about 5.53 million tonnes.

Causes of Land Degradation in India

There are seven main causes of land degradation in India:

1. Excessive population pressure on land. India supports approximately 16% of the world’s human population and 20% of the world’s livestock population on merely 2.5% of the world’s geographical area. The steady growth of the human as well as livestock population, the widespread incidence of poverty, and the current phase of economic and trade liberalization is exerting heavy pressures on India’s limited land resources for competing uses in forestry, agriculture, pastures, human settlements, and industries. This has led to very significant land degradation.
2. Deforestation. India loses 1.3 million hectares of forests per year. One of the major causes of desertification is the cutting down of trees. According to the National Remote Sensing Agency (NRSA), India had less than 11.4% of the area under forest as per the 1992 observation. But the more recent satellite pictures show that the forest cover is now less than 10%.
3. Erosion. Loss of vegetative cover has made land more susceptible to erosion. Agents of erosion like wind and water have left vast tracts of land barren. Water erodes topsoil to an extent of around 12,000 million tonnes (mt) per annum. The loss of topsoil represents a permanent depletion of the resource base. The annual loss caused by the erosion of topsoil through water comes to Rs.12,000 crores.
4. Over-irrigation. Big irrigation projects no doubt have brought prosperity to millions of farmers. But due to over-enthusiasm, many farmers have resorted to successive cropping and over-irrigation, thereby leading to water-logging and consequent salinization and alkalinization. This situation mainly arises due to poor drainage.
5. Floods and droughts. It is ironic that in India both floods and droughts occur regularly and alternately. According to the National Commission on Agriculture (1976), there are three types of drought: meteorological drought caused by a marked decrease in rainfall, hydrological drought caused by prolonged meteorological drought and its consequent effects on water sources, and agricultural drought caused by insufficient rainfall to support crops. 35% of the land is drought-prone and receives rainfall of less than 750 mm. Another 18.5% of the land receiving 750-1000 mm falls in the transitional zone. The remaining 46.5% receiving rainfall of over 1000 mm falls under the humid zone. The impact of drought leads to a shortage of fodder, a shortage of drinking water, a loss in agricultural production, and a general decline in living standards. Drought is both man-made and environment-induced. Man has played a key role in the creation of drought-prone areas due to his over-exploitation of natural resources like forests, degradation of grazing lands, excessive withdrawal of groundwater, silting of tanks, rivers, etc. Floods, on the other hand, are caused by heavy rains in a very short period. Each situation could have been altered had there been good vegetal cover. Vegetation helps in reducing run-off, increasing infiltration, and reducing soil erosion. The land area prone to floods has doubled from 20 million hectares to above 40 million hectares in the last ten years.
6. Grazing. India possesses an area which is just a fortieth of the total land area of the world supporting 197 million cattle and ranking first in the world for cattle population. To support such an immense cattle population we have only 13 Mha as pasture land. This has led to serious problems as animals have encroached into forest lands and even agricultural lands. Due to a lack of green fodder, animals are pushed to the fringes of reserve forests and are thus destabilizing the forest vegetation. Land degradation due to overgrazing leads to desert-like conditions, which in turn reduce animal productivity and increase the economic pressure on human beings who depend on animals for their livelihood. Grazing would not be a problem if the dung of the animals is left as fertilizer. Unfortunately, it is removed to be used as fuel, to be sold to intensively farmed areas, etc.
7. Pollution. Pollution of land is caused by the disposal of solid waste and refuse from domestic, industrial, and agricultural sectors. Industrial wastes are chemical residues, fly ash from thermal power stations, plastics, rubber, glass, and discarded metal. Agricultural residues are pesticides and fertilizers. Another major source of pollution not known to the general public is the creation of derelict land due to mining. Roughly 0.8 Mha of land in India is despoiled due to open or surface and underground mining activities. Though this problem is highly location-specific and restricted to remote areas, it necessarily warrants attention in terms of wise remedies of land. Somewhere someone is affected due to mining and reclamation of such derelict land.

Remedies of Land Degradation

1. Wastelands should be afforested on a massive scale involving local people. People themselves should select trees that will meet their requirements.
2. The demand for timber should be drastically reduced. Substitutes for furniture material and packing cases should be used. This would ease pressure on standing forests.
3. Catchment areas or water sheds must be thickly vegetated. This would hold rainwater and recharge springs, rivers, etc.
4. Cultivation on hilly slopes should require terracing and bundling along contour lines.
5. Tanks should be desilted, check dams constructed, and small ponds created to hold run-off water.
6. Shifting agriculture should be replaced by settled agriculture.
7. Fertilisers and micronutrients should be applied correctly and only if required. Periodic sampling of soils should be done.
8. More use of organic manure. Too much stress has been given to inorganic fertilizers. But we have to realize that excessive application of inorganic fertilizers is not a healthy way of practicing agriculture. Traditional methods of multiple cropping and intercropping to maintain soil fertility have to be given more emphasis. Cereal crops can be mixed with nitrogen–fixers and grown together, such as maize and beans.
9. Grazing of cattle in forests must be checked. Rotational grazing and hand cutting of grass will save pasture lands. Stall feeding has to be implemented. Creation of more pasture lands and reclamation of wastelands for pasture development through the propagation of new grasses and application of optimum fertilizers need to be implemented.
10. Most important, local communities must be educated on the need to leave the dung alone, rather than burning it for fuel or selling it for cash. It will regenerate the land, paying rich dividends in the long run.
11. The location of industries must be carefully studied. Industries, like thermal power stations and dams, should not displace prime agricultural land.
12. The unplanned or haphazard growth of urban development must be checked. 20% of the world’s population lives in cities. By the year 2003, this will rise to 34%.

Conclusions

It can be concluded that land degradation is a serious problem in India that need to be tackled because shrinking of land resource base will lead to a substantial decline in food grain production, which in turn would hamper the economic growth rate and there would also be unprecedented increase in mortality rate owing to hunger and malnutrition.

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