Technologies for wasteland development

WHEN we analyse the causes of land degradation, these often centre around pressure on land resources due to ever-increasing human and livestock population, thin spread of available resources and our inability to foresee and take appropriate and timely action to offset ecological repercussions that follow most development programmes based on inadequate planning. In the past 2 to 3 decades, when we could increase food production to meet the needs of our increasing population, adequate attention was not paid to maintain the productivity of our soil resources. The result of this neglect is that vast stretches of our soils are now at various stages of degradation. Of late there has been a realization of the need to reverse the degradation processes and to rehabilitate degraded lands. To give an impetus to the programmes of rehabilitating degraded lands, the Government of India has set up a National Wastelands Development Board with a major responsibility to assist in vegetating soils that have reached low productivity levels and are lying barren.

Technologies for the management of degraded lands have been generated at several research centres of the ICAR. They are being constantly improved upon as more knowledge on the nature of degradation processes and their management is being gained. It was the objective of this publication to bring together the State of Art' as far as technologies for rehabilitation of degraded lands are concerned. The problems of arid and semi-arid regions are discussed in sections II and III, and salt-affected soils and their management including problems of waterlogging have been presented in section V. The problem of water erosion which is perhaps the most serious land degradation phenomenon, is discussed in section IV. Apart from specific technologies, the social and economic issues involved in adopting these technologies on a field scale have been dealt in separate articles.