India s soils are in a bad shape. T V Jayan investigates

Fertilisers boost plant growth but imbalanced application soon leads to use-fatigue

Agricultural growth in India has always laboured under the burden of producing more. The idea was: grow only foodgrains. That meant: not ecologically adapted cereals such as millets, but rice and

A third factor has led to the current debility of soils in India: irrigation. That is to say, water over-use. To feed the rice-wheat mentality, net irrigated area rose from 20.8 million ha in 1950 to

The domino effect of bad policy-making and its fallout

Soils are a very slow renewable resource. To reclaim them requires, above all, a long-term plan. With falling productivity, the realisation has sunk in that soils cannot be blindly mined, and that

The article on

Bihar is a predominantly agricultural State with 86 per cent of her population depending upon agriculture. In my study of the National Income of Bihar published in the Indian Journal of Economics, July 1951, I had estimated the gross agricultural income of Bihar for the year 1846-47 at Rs. 230 crores, basing myself on the statistics published in the Season and Crop Report, and at Rs. 272 crores when based on the statistics contained in the Crop Survey Report.