Land degradation

Land degradation is a temporary or permanent fall in land's productive capacity. It is caused by soil erosion, waterlogging, salinisation and alkalinisation. If not checked, it turns land into wasteland.

The National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC) maps India's wastelands, in three groups:

• natural: gullies, sands, bare rock, steep slopes, glaciers;
• natural and human: waterlogged, saline and alkaline land;
• human-made: degraded forests, degraded pastures, mining wastelands.

The human-made wastelands matter more, because they can be prevented and reversed.

Case study: Jhabua, a Bhil tribal district in Madhya Pradesh, restored its degraded common land through watershed programmes and community action: each household planted and cared for at least one tree, fodder grass was grown, and villagers agreed to 'social fencing' (keeping grazing animals out by agreement). People can heal degraded land.