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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