As the police has not yet issued them a no-objection certificate (NoC), we have been forced to postpone our plans to start the scheme before monsoon,” said a top civic official from the solid waste management (SWM) department.The civic body had appointed 23 private security agencies that will appoint marshals at 778 places in the city to ensure cleanliness.“The registration of these agencies with the police has been going on since China Aluminum air grill the last month. However, the civic body was inundated with complaints of corruptionand high-handedness.The clean-up marshal scheme has been discontinued twice earlier – once in 2011 and the second time in 2014 – amidst allegations of corruption by the marshals.

Started in 2007, the civic body appointed several private agencies whose marshals were authorised to fine people who littered public places.However, some of the controversial clauses in the earlier scheme like a Rs 20,000 fine on dumping of debris and a Rs 10,000 fine for throwing biomedical waste have been removed from the scheme, said officials.This monsoon, the city may face cleanliness issues which could lead to a rise in monsoon-related ailments. The reason being the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation’s plans to restart the clean-up marshal scheme before the monsoon has hit a roadblock due to delay in security agencies getting police permission.

The civic body had made it compulsory for these agencies to register with the police and seek no-objection certificates (NoC) from them.Civic officials said clean-up marshals would be appointed at crowded places like markets, railway stations, roads, beaches, commercial complexes and hawking zones with the authority to fine people for spitting, urinating and littering in public places.

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For instance, Monocrotophos, banned in the US because it killed birds and a wide variety of non-target insects, is still being used in India without any supervision. Yes some of the pesticides and chemicals from the soil have entered our food chain.Ironically, actions we took, or are still taking, to make land more productive in order to meet the food requirements China Yanxin Environmental Manufacturers of our growing population have caused immense damage to our soil.Shyam Khadka is the India representative of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation. The results are there for all of us to see. The earthworm’s night soil has bacterial population that is nearly a hundred times more than in the surrounding soil. Organisms inhabiting soils form a complex web of ecological activity called the soil food web that makes all life possible.

They ensure good, healthy soils, tirelessly digesting leaf litter and other biomass along with soil. Many insect species are soil dwellers for at least some stage of their life-cycle. Perhaps it is still not too late to make interventions that prevent or even reverse land degradation.According to (2010) estimates of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research, of India’s total area of 328. We need to remind ourselves, it takes a thousand years for 1 cm of soil to be formed. While a wealth of knowledge and research on soils exists in the country these need to be communicated to farmers. Like earthworms, other organisms living in the soil also nourish it. India, for sure, will need to arrest the bulge and reverse land degradation. A third of India’s land is already degraded, putting a question mark on the sustainability of its food production.

The country’s recently launched Soil Card programme may, to a certain extent, solve the problem, provided it is backed by extension services to farmers. Desertification or soil erosion, mainly caused by wind and rain, are natural phenomena we can mitigate by providing forest or other vegetation cover.Take the humble earthworm, for instance.Where we need to bring about a major change is in the judicious use of pesticides and chemical fertilisers. In fact, nowhere in nature are living species so densely packed as in some soil communities.Soils are not inert.As the International Year of Soils (2015) draws to an end it may be pertinent to ask, how clean is our soil. Currently, many of the pesticides that India produces and uses extensively have been banned in other parts of the world.3 billion tonnes of soil gets eroded every year. As water and wind erosion is widespread across India, some 5.

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