Boosting production

New urea policy is showing encouraging results

With the commissioning of the fertiliser plant at Ramagundam in Telangana last week, India has inched closer to achieving self-sufficiency in urea and can now look forward to becoming an exporter of this most-consumed crop nutrient in near future. This is one of the five public-sector fertiliser plants that were junked years ago but were taken up for revival under the New Urea Policy of 2015. These units, together, would add over 6 million tonnes to the country’s existing urea production capacity. The plants at Gorakhpur in Uttar Pradesh and at Barauni in Bihar have already started functioning and the others are in advanced stages of construction. Besides, two more private-sector urea factories with a total capacity of 2.6 million tonnes have become operational at Kota in Rajasthan and Panagarh in West Bengal. Moreover, the new urea policy has helped enhance the energy-use efficiency of the existing 25 gas-based urea units, thereby, increasing their net output. With this, the country’s urea production is expected to rise adequately to more or less bridge the gap between the demand and supply.
 

However, the government’s fertiliser subsidy bill may still remain high because of the unabated imports of phosphatic and potassic fertilisers and heavy discounts on their sale. As pointed out by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while dedicating the Ramagundam plant to the nation, a bag of di-ammonium phosphate (DAP), priced in the international market at around Rs 4,000, is being supplied to farmers at only around Rs 2,500. Notably, urea is virtually the only fertiliser India can manufacture wholly indigenously. For the production of phosphatic and potassic fertilisers, it needs to import either the raw material or intermediaries for want of adequate local availability of these minerals. So, the subsidy on these fertilisers is likely to remain fairly high, moving in tandem with their global prices.
 

That said, the real game-changer in the field of nitrogenous fertilisers is going to be the newly evolved “nano urea”, which has begun to replace part of the granular urea now being used in farming. This innovative liquid urea, developed and patented by the cooperative sector fertiliser giant, the Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative (IFFCO), contains nitrogen nutrient in a size that is much thinner than that in normal granular urea. IFFCO has licensed the technology for the production of this liquid fertiliser to a couple of public-sector urea producers free of cost to make this critical plant nutrient available to farmers at cheaper rates to lower the input costs and boost farming profitability. One 500 ml bottle of nano urea is deemed equivalent to a bag of normal urea.

The commercial production of nano urea, which began in August 2021 at IFFCO’s Kalol plant in Gujarat, is already being scaled up to around 440 million bottles, which would be equivalent to around 20 million tonnes of urea. The government is lending full support to the production and promotion of this unique product for the benefit of farmers. Its use on a large scale is likely to spare a sizable quantity of the locally produced normal urea for exports, thereby, transforming the country into a net exporter of urea, instead of being a major importer, as it now is.