Over 29 per cent of India's land degrading

BENGALURU: More than a quarter of the total geographic area (TGA)-96.4 million hectares (mha) or 29.32%-in India is undergoing degradation as per decadal information compiled for the the period 2011-13, posing a major challenge to the country's commitment to the UN of achieving a land degradation neutral status by 2030.

The information is for the years 2011-13, as per the Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas, released in June by Isro Space Applications Centre (SAC) using remore sensing data. The Atlas was commissioned by the ministry of environment, Forests and Climate Change.

India has managed to reclaim about 1.87mha of land that was under degradation in 2003-05 period, but that has been offset by nearly double the area of productive land (3.63mha) lost to degradation from then to 2011-13.

The most significant process of degradation is water erosion (loss of soil cover mainly due to rainfall and surface runoff water) at 10.98%, followed by vegetation degradation (mainly as deforestation) at 8.91% and wind erosion (denotes the spread of sand by various processes) at 5.55%.

Of the 96.4mha, just nine states, Rajasthan, Maharashtra, Gujarat, Jammu & Kashmir, Karnataka, Jharkhand, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Telangana account for 23.95% of land degradation, while all other remaining states are have less than 1% each of degradation.

Further, 25% or 82,64mha of the land is under desertification (prolonged degradation). From 2002-05, the increase in area under desertification is 1.16mha. The most significant processes of desertification in arid region is observed to be wind erosion and in semi-arid and dry sub-humid regions vegetation degradation and water erosion dominates.

Food security concerns

Land degradation of such magnitude also raises concerns of food security. CP Rajendran, a senior scientist at the Jawaharlal Nehru Centre for Advanced Scientific Research (JNCASR), who has published several papers on land change and even been part of an Unesco project in 2013, says that loss of topsoil, especially is a matter of grave concern.

"Earlier, soil loss was a slow process which took millions of years. Now, we have managed to change that in just a few decades, but the natural time for the soil to regain what it loses is still as long. So we must take up stalling of degradation on priority," he said.

"There must be a clear policy on reforestation and harvesting of water. As the atlas points out, the usefulness of land is slowly decreasing and that is never a good sign for us," he added.

Dr DJ Bagyaraj, the only Indian scientist on the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) Working Committee on the UN's initiative for a Global Soil Partnership programme, says: "We are not returning the nutrients that we end up using from the land (soil). We cannot use land as if it has an endless pool of resources."

"...Add to this, the introduction of xenobiotics (man-made chemicals and other materials) for increased yield and so on and we are staring at irreparable damages. The natural bio-organisms cannot degrade these alien materials and they affect land," he said.

India, which is a signatory to the United Nations Convention on Combating Desertification (UNCCD) has been trying to reserve such phenomena, but in vain. The status of India's desertification and land degradation is an important contribution to India's report to the UNCCD.

Isro has said that the maps and salient findings compiled in the form of Atlas are meant for a ready reference to be used by concerned policy makers, regional planners and researchers.

"The geospatial database along with corresponding satellite data can be easily used for regional planning and to the ongoing National Action Plans (NAP) and Sustainable Land and Ecosystem Management (SLEM) programme for combating desertification/land degradation and can be easily updated in future," Isro has said.