The paper describes the effect of rains on vegetal cover, different traditional practices and soil properties in the dry and monsoon period. Seven landuse systems i.e. open pine forests, tea plantation, rainfed agriculture, degraded land, grassland, recently restored site and a bare land were identified in the Bhetagad watershed of the Central Himalaya.

Rice (Oryza sativa L.)

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