Massive erosion along the southern bank of the Brahmaputra in its 150-kilometre course from Hatimura to Kapilimukh in Nagaon district in Assam has placed people's lives

Be careful how land use and land cover changes

Majuli, a river island within the two arms of the mighty Brahmaputra river, is a site having extreme historical and cultural importance, and warrants immediate exposure to the scientific community. The island faces an acute erosion problem as no permanent anti-erosion measures based on proper geohydrological models have been adopted so far. The land area of the island, as evidenced from the IRS satellite imagery of 1998, is 577.65 km2 compared to 1245 km2 according to available historical records. The available data indicate an erosion rate of 1.9 km2 / yr for the period of 1920–98.

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