Soil Health Crisis

India is facing a severe soil health crisis, with nearly 90% of its topsoil suffering from deficiencies in essential nutrients like nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. This has significant implications for agricultural sustainability, food security, and climate resilience. The recent Global Soils Conference highlighted this issue and called for strategies to restore soil health. One promising solution discussed is nutrient circularity, which involves recycling urban organic waste to replenish soil nutrients in rural areas. However, existing waste management practices, particularly waste-to-energy (WtE) plants, have faced multiple challenges, failing to adequately address the waste crisis and contributing to environmental harm.

Key Points

• With its extraordinary capacity to form, store, transform, and recycle nutrients, soil produces 95 per cent of the world’s food. However, 33 per cent of global soils are already degraded, and this trend is accelerating.
  • 90% of India's topsoil is deficient in nitrogen and phosphorus.
  • 50% lacks potassium, critical for agricultural productivity.
  • Soil erosion, degradation, and low nutrient content threaten long-term agricultural sustainability.
• Nutrient Circularity: This approach reduces reliance on chemical fertilizers, enhances soil fertility, and improves cost-efficiency in agriculture (lowering production costs by 15-20%).
• Scaling Up Nutrient Circularity: To address India’s waste and soil crises, scaling up nutrient circularity is key.
  • A two-pronged approach is needed:
    • Top-down policy support to incentivize composting and improve quality.
    • Bottom-up demand from farmers and the public for better compost.
  • A more sustainable approach could gradually phase out chemical fertilizers, restoring soil health in both rural and urban areas.
• Challenges with Current Waste-to-Energy (WtE) Models: Incineration-based WtE plants dominate, but they come with high costs, significant environmental impacts, and high failure rates.
  • In Delhi, 7,250 tonnes of the 11,328 tonnes of waste generated daily is incinerated.
  • These plants emit more greenhouse gases and air pollutants than other power sources, harming public health and the environment.
• Biomethanation plants face challenges like poor waste segregation and methane leakages.
• Despite these efforts, WtE plants contribute only 1% of renewable energy generation in India, far behind other renewable sources like solar and wind.

• Government's Failed Policy on Nutrient Circularity:
  • In 2016, India introduced a subsidy of ?1,500 per tonne for compost sold under the City Compost Policy to promote nutrient circularity. However, the policy failed due to lack of:
    • Quality control (no standards, testing, or certification mechanisms).
    • Public demand for compost.
  • The policy was withdrawn in 2021, and all financial support shifted to bio-methanation.
• The Potential of Composting:
  • Composting is a more cost-effective alternative to biomethanation.
  • It can be implemented at various scales, even in small towns.
  • Several cities like Chikkaballapur (Karnataka) and Alappuzha (Kerala) have successfully implemented composting models that transfer urban waste compost to rural farmers, promoting nutrient circularity.

Factors killing soil & solution

• Farming practices such as tilling break up the soil and destroy its natural structure, killing many of the vital bacteria.
• Agricultural chemicals can alter the physiological, metabolic and biochemical behaviour of microbiota in the soil. This can disrupt the relationships between plants and microbes, decreasing nutrient bioavailability.
• Pressures of population growth, food insecurity and agricultural intensification are leading to widespread soil degradation. This degradation can take many forms- degradation, erosion, acidification, salinization
• Others:Burning of crop residues, land misuse and soil mismanagement and climate change
• Solution:Replenishment, adopting organic practice (inter-cropping, mixed cropping, practicing crop rotation, Agroforestry, Permaculture, adopting biofertilizers.