03/09/2019 - Environment | Mainstorming

IAS Parliament 5 years

KEY POINTS

Chemical fertilisers alone are not responsible for degradation of land and its fertility. Nor a reduction in their use alone would check this menace.

Factors of Land degradation

· The significant factors are: Improper tillage; inept on-farm land and water management; soil erosion; water logging; salinity, alkalinity; imbalanced nutrient application; deteriorating biological and microbial profile of soils and, most importantly, the neglect of organic manures.

· The fertiliser-responsive high-yielding crop varieties which brought about the green revolution that made the country surplus in most agri-products.

· Such high-output varieties normally require larger amounts of soil nutrients which farmyard manures alone cannot provide. These manures are, however, essential to supply micronutrients which the chemical fertilisers generally lack.

Challenges

· While on the one hand it intends to discourage chemical fertilisers, but on the other, it offers hefty subsidies on them, more than 70 per cent in the case of urea to push up their consumption.

· There are problems also with the subsidies. These are neither rational nor uniform for different types of fertilisers. These, therefore, result in the imbalanced use of nutrients to the detriment of soil health.

· Moreover, while phosphatic, potassic and mixed fertilisers have been brought under the nutrient-based subsidy (NBS) scheme, the most-consumed urea has, for inexplicable reasons, been left out of it.

· The price of urea, too, has been kept unreasonably low. Steps like rationalisation of subsidies and decontrol of urea prices by bringing it under the NBS regime are vital to ensure balanced application of nutrients.

Measures

· The need truly is to curb the injudicious use of fertilisers and promote their need-driven application.

· Farm experts, therefore, recommend the conjunctive use of chemical fertilisers and organic composts for best results.

· Studies have shown that fertilisers, if applied in the right quantity, at the right time and at the right place (root zone), along with adequate doses of organic manures, tend to preserve soil productivity rather than spoil it.

· Introduction of the soil health cards system and mandatory neem-coating of urea can be the typical cases in point. The next logical step would be to incentivise the production and use of organic manures and bio-fertilisers by offering fiscal incentives at par with those of chemical fertilisers.

· The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) has recently developed a liquid bio-NPK formulation which can augment the supply of all the three major plant nutrients (N or nitrogen, P or phosphate and K or potash) without harming the soils.