Dead Soil Can Be Brought Back To Life

The gross cropped area in the country has hovered around 186 million hectares since the beginning of the 1990s. This has led to the general belief that farm land cannot be expanded further without sacrificing the forest areas that nobody would advise to do. However, this is not entirely so. Vast stretches of land, estimated at about 8.4 million hectares, are affected with alkalinity, salinity or other soil afflictions which are curable. Reclamation of afflicted soil can help increase the cropped acreage perceptibly with obvious consequences for farm production, employment and income generation.

The Karnal-based Central Soil Salinity Research Institute (CSSRI) has already evolved, and successfully demonstrated in the field, the technology for restoring salt-affected land to good health, making it fit for crop production. The usefulness of this technology has recently been endorsed in the social audit conducted by a specially appointed committee which was headed by former minister of state for agriculture Som Pal and had experts as well as politicians as members. The audit report has minced no words to point out that the reclamation technology is financially feasible and yields several direct and indirect benefits.

 

Unfortunately, this technology is yet to be gainfully exploited to the desired extent. Only about eight lakh hectares, not even 10 per cent of the total salt-affected land, has so far been ameliorated. The audit committee found the benefits accruing from putting this hitherto barren land to agricultural use to be enormous. Besides, producing an additional 3.5 to 4.0 million tonnes of foodgrains, valued at around Rs 1,000 crore, it has generated an annual employment of 75 million mandays. Impact studies have also shown that land restoration spurs growth of many agro-based and auxiliary industries, such as poultry, dairying, farm machinery repair centres, etc., in the restored tracts. The reclamation of water-logged saline lands has been found to result in reduced incidence of diseases like malaria, filaria and water-borne maladies.

The salt-related adversities of the land include alkalinity, salinity, inland water-logged salinity and coastal salinity. Alkaline lands, known variously as sodic, "ussar" or "kallar", found predominantly in the Indo-Gangetic plains where good quality water is available are the easiest to rejuvenate. All that is needed is to mix adequate quantity of gypsum in the soil to neutralise the excess sodium present in the form of sodium carbonate. A crop of rice, followed by wheat, can be raised in the very first year after reclamation. The repeated additions of gypsum helps fully restore the soil health in a few years.

The saline soils which generally contain a surfeit of soluble salts like chlorides and sulphates of sodium and magnesium, can be reclaimed by leaching down the salts by using lots of water. Mercifully, most of such soils are permeable enough to facilitate this treatment.

But in areas where the water table is already high, such as water-logged saline lands, sub-surface drainage has to be provided for restoring the salt balance. In areas where water availability is limited, the CSSRI experts have devised ways to collect and utilise rain water for this purpose.

The management of coastal salinity that has crippled over three million hectares in a 50-km wide belt along the entire sea coast, however, is a little more complicated affair as it requires preventive embankments as well as field level water management. The CSSRI has worked out the specific need-based details of these measures.

It would indeed be a pity if such a useful technology is allowed to remain on paper for want of necessary initiatives from state governments. Only a few states, such as Haryana, Punjab, Uttar Pradesh, West Bengal, Gujarat, Maharashtra and Kerala, have shown some, albeit far from adequate, interest in it. The Centre can perhaps motivate them by providing higher budgetary support for land reclamation as recommended by the social audit committee.