Thirty years after banning manual scavenging under the Night Soil Carrying System Abolition Act, Karnataka is still a fair way away from flushing it out of the system. On April 25, 2003, though, a minuscule step was taken in this direction when the Bangal

Biosolids combat poisoning

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