Chapter 12: Environmental Management And Land Use Pattern
In 2016, scientists at the Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad did something no field surveyor could ever do: they looked at the whole of India at once. Using images sent down by remote-sensing satellites, they built a map that covered every district, from the Thar sands in the west to the Assam floodplain in the east.
What the map showed was quietly alarming. Across large stretches of the country, the land itself was wearing out — thinning under wind, washing away in the rain, turning salty under standing water, losing the fertility that had fed farmers for centuries. Nearly a third of India’s land carried some sign of this decay.
Land is easy to take for granted, because it looks permanent. A field ploughed this year will, we assume, be there to plough next year. But India’s total land area is fixed — it cannot grow by a single hectare — while the number of people it must feed, house and employ keeps rising. Every road, every new colony, every brick kiln takes land that a crop once grew on. And land that stays under the plough can still be spent, its soil exhausted as surely as a mine is emptied of ore.
This chapter asks one hard question: is the environment a resource we draw down, or a capital we must keep intact? Then it follows that question into the fields of India.
Diagram
Fig. 12.0-1 Caption: India’s land area is fixed, but the claims upon it keep growing. Brief: A schematic, not a real map. Draw a single fixed rectangle in the centre labelled ‘Total geographical area of India — this does not change’. From all four sides, draw bold arrows pointing inward toward the rectangle, each labelled with one competing claim on land: cropland, housing and settlements, roads and railways, industry, grazing land, forests. Along the lower edge, add a shaded band creeping inward labelled ‘usable land lost to degradation’. Every arrow points inward, to show pressure converging on one fixed area. Conceptual only — no numbers.
12.1 Environment, Development And The Need For Management
Before we can study how India uses its land, we need to settle a prior question: how should people treat the natural world they draw on? The answer shapes everything that follows in this chapter.
12.1.1 What Environment And Development Mean
The word environment comes from the French environ, meaning to surround. In geography it means the sum total of the conditions that surround life at a given place and time. It is everything around an organism — the living parts (plants, animals, microbes) and the non-living parts (air, water, soil, rock, sunlight), together with the surroundings that people have built.
Development means the overall improvement in the economic, social and political conditions of a society — better incomes, health, education, roads and housing. Every kind of development draws on the natural world. It needs land, water, minerals, energy and food, and all of these come from the environment.
Here lies the tension the whole chapter turns on. Development improves human life, but it does so by using natural resources — and when that use is careless or greedy, it damages the very environment that made the development possible.
Too often, people use resources thoughtlessly for quick gain. The result is polluted rivers, cleared forests, exhausted soils and fouled air. This is why a new task has been added to the idea of development: managing the environment even as we develop it.
12.1.2 Environmental Management
Environmental management is the process of planning, reviewing, assessing and making decisions about the environment, carried out in the real situation of limited resources and changing priorities. Its purpose is to conserve the environment while a society develops.
The need is felt most sharply in developing countries — those still building up their incomes, industries and infrastructure, such as India — because the pressure to grow quickly is greatest there. Richer, already-industrialised countries put safeguards in place earlier, and have developed tools such as clean technologies (production methods that pollute less), environmental auditing (a check on how much damage an activity does) and eco-friendly products.
Environmental management works at many levels at once. It tries to control pollution, protect biodiversity, frame national and regional environmental policies, spread public awareness, educate people and fund research — and it fixes responsibility when plans are not carried out. Government and non-government organisations must work together for any of this to succeed.
12.1.3 Sustainable Development
Environmental management became the tool for a larger idea: sustainable development. It is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
This definition comes from Our Common Future, the 1987 report of the World Commission on Environment and Development, chaired by Gro Harlem Brundtland — which is why it is often called the Brundtland Report.
The idea rests on fairness across time, called intergenerational equity: the present generation may use the earth, but must not use it up. If we clear every forest and drain every aquifer now, our grandchildren inherit a poorer planet. Sustainable development asks us to grow in ways the earth can keep supporting, year after year.
12.1.4 Environment As Capital, Not Just Resource
Why does the syllabus insist that the environment be seen as capital rather than as a resource? The difference is not just a matter of words — it changes how we act.
A resource is something you draw on and spend. Treat a forest, a soil or an aquifer as a resource, and the natural move is to take as much as you can, as fast as you can, for immediate gain. Capital is different. Capital is a stock you protect, living off its yield without touching the principal — the way a careful family lives off the interest on its savings rather than eating into the savings themselves.
Many parts of the environment behave exactly like capital. Renewable resources — forests, soils, fisheries, fresh water — renew themselves, but only at a certain rate. Harvest a forest slower than it regrows and it lasts indefinitely; cut it faster and the stock collapses. Non-renewable resources — minerals, coal, petroleum — are a fixed stock that cannot regrow at all. For these, capital thinking means using them sparingly and efficiently, and building substitutes before they run out.
The two ways of thinking lead to two very different futures, as Fig. 12.1-1 shows.
Flowchart
Fig. 12.1-1 Caption: The same forest, soil or river can be treated in two ways — and the two ways end very differently. Nodes: A patch of environment — forest, soil or groundwater → is it seen as a resource or as capital? → seen as RESOURCE → used for immediate gain, faster than it can recover → the stock shrinks → degradation → little left for the next generation; OR → seen as CAPITAL → used only within its rate of renewal → the stock stays whole → a steady yield year after year → still there for the next generation
Seen as a resource, the environment is spent and degraded; seen as capital, it is managed and kept whole. This single shift — from spending the environment to keeping it intact — is what environmental management and sustainable development are really about.
12.2 Land As A Resource
Of all the natural capital a country holds, land is the most basic, because almost every human activity has to happen somewhere on it. This section defines land as a resource and asks what decides the way it is used.
12.2.1 What Land Resource Means
When geographers speak of land, they mean far more than the bare surface. Land is the surface together with the soil, water, vegetation and minerals on and beneath it — the platform on which farming, building, grazing, mining and movement all take place.
A land resource, then, is the land available to a society, valued for what can be done on it. The same hectare may serve as a paddy field, a factory site, a grazing ground or a forest, depending on how people choose to use it.
Land matters because nearly everything depends on it. It grows our food, holds our homes, carries our roads and railways, and stores the minerals and water we draw on. In an agricultural country like India, where a large share of people still earn their living from farming, land is the single most important resource of all.
But land as a resource carries a set of hard problems. Its supply is fixed — a country cannot manufacture more land — even as the demands upon it keep rising. It is unevenly useful, fertile in some places and barren in others. It can be degraded, losing fertility to erosion, salt or neglect. Its ownership is often split into tiny, scattered pieces. And its uses compete: land taken for a city is land lost to a crop. The rest of this chapter is, in effect, a study of these problems one by one.
12.2.2 The Factors That Shape Land Use
Land use is never the same everywhere, and it does not stay fixed over time. These differences — from place to place (spatial) and from one period to another (temporal) — arise from the continued interplay of physical and human factors.
The physical factors set what the land is able to support. Relief and slope decide whether land can be ploughed at all — a steep hillside is fit for forest or grazing, not for a tractor. Soil decides how fertile it is. Climate, through its rainfall and temperature, decides which crops, if any, will grow.
The human factors decide what people actually do with the land the physical setting allows. The density of population presses more heavily on land where people are many. How long an area has been settled shapes how intensively it is worked. Land tenure — the system of who owns land and on what terms — decides who may use it and how. And the technical level of the people decides what they can wring from it: irrigation, machines and fertiliser can turn poor land productive.
Because both sets of factors act together, and because both keep changing, the map of land use is never still, as Fig. 12.2-1 sets out.
Flowchart
Fig. 12.2-1 Caption: Land use at any place is the joint outcome of what nature offers and what people can do with it. Nodes: Physical factors — relief and slope, soil, climate → set what the land can support; AND Human factors — population density, how long the area has been settled, land tenure, level of technology → set what people choose to do with it → the two act together → the land use of that place → which changes from place to place (spatial variation) and over time (temporal variation)
12.3 The Land Use Pattern Of India
We can now open the account book of India’s land and see how one fixed area is actually divided among all the uses that compete for it.
12.3.1 Reading The Land Use Table
India’s total land is fixed, but two different figures describe it. The total geographical area of the country is about 328.73 million hectares. Complete land-use records, however, cover a smaller reporting area — the area for which land-use statistics are actually collected — of about 306.54 million hectares in 2019-20.
Why the gap of some 22 million hectares? Parts of the country — remote high mountains, some unsurveyed tracts — are not fully covered by the land-records system. Because the totals are set against the reporting area, not the full geographical area, that is the base we must use whenever we read shares.
Land use is the way this reporting area is divided among its different uses. Land-record officials sort it into a standard set of categories, shown in Table 12.1 (Agricultural Statistics at a Glance 2022).
Read the table with care. The first eight categories are the physical parcels of land; added together they make up the reporting area of 306.54 million hectares. The last two rows are different — they describe cropping, not extra land. We shall return to them under net area sown and area sown more than once.
Reading down the physical categories, net area sown is by far the largest, followed by forests and then the land that cannot be cultivated at all. The smaller categories — pastures, waste and fallows — share what is left.
Two of the physical categories are covered fully elsewhere and need only a note here. Forests occupy 71.75 million hectares, about 23 per cent of the reporting area. This is the recorded forest area — land legally classed as forest — which has grown from 40.48 million hectares in 1950-51, yet still falls short of the roughly one-third of the land that a forest-cover goal would require. Land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves (3.13 million hectares) is cultivable land put to minor tree use — bamboo, thatching grass and fuel groves — but not counted as cropland.
The proportions become clearer as a picture, in Fig. 12.3-1.
Graph
Fig. 12.3-1 Caption: How India’s reporting area is shared among its main land uses, 2019-20. Brief: A pie chart showing each physical land-use category as a share of the 306.54 million-hectare reporting area (2019-20, Agricultural Statistics at a Glance 2022). Slices, in million hectares: net area sown 139.92; forests 71.75; land not available for cultivation 44.32; current fallows 13.77; culturable waste 11.95; fallow other than current fallows 11.24; permanent pastures and other grazing lands 10.48; land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves 3.13. Label each slice with its category name and percentage of the reporting area. Do not include area sown more than once (it is not a separate parcel of land).
12.3.2 Net Area Sown
Net area sown is the total area actually sown with crops in a year, counted only once — even where the same field is cropped twice. It is the real, physical extent of India’s cropland.
Net area sown covers 139.92 million hectares, about 46 per cent of the reporting area:
\[\frac{139.92}{306.54} \times 100 = 45.6 \text{ per cent}\]
This is a strikingly high share. The world cultivates only about a third of its land, so India ploughs a far larger fraction of its surface than most large countries. In an agricultural country, this matters enormously, because farm production depends directly on how much land is sown.
The trouble is that there is little room to expand it. Net area sown has crept up only slowly — from 118.746 million hectares in 1950-51 to 139.92 million hectares in 2019-20 — because the land left over is mostly too steep, too dry or too rocky to plough. Almost all the good arable land is already under crops. To feed a still-growing population, therefore, India cannot rely on sowing more land; it must harvest more from the land it already sows.
12.3.3 Area Sown More Than Once
Area sown more than once is land that carries more than one crop in the same year. If a field grows a winter crop and then a summer crop, its area is counted twice — once for each harvest. It demands two things: fertile soil and an assured supply of water.
This area came to 71.46 million hectares in 2019-20 — over half the net area sown. Adding it to the net area sown gives the gross cropped area (or total cropped area), the total of all crops grown in the year: 211.36 million hectares.
From these two totals we get cropping intensity, the clearest single measure of how hard a country works its farmland.
A cropping intensity of about 151 per cent means that, on average, every 100 hectares of farmland grows 151 hectares’ worth of crops across the year — a little over one and a half crops per field. Because India can barely add to its net area sown, this is where extra food must come from: more crops on the same land. That in turn depends on irrigation and quick-maturing seeds. Large tracts of the Indo-Ganga plain in Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Bihar, and the well-watered coasts, sow much of their land more than once; the dry, rain-fed interior barely manages one crop. The national figure hides that gap.
12.3.4 Land Not Available For Cultivation
Land not available for cultivation is land that cannot be cropped at all. It has two parts. The first is land put to non-agricultural uses — the ground under villages, towns, roads, railways, factories and water bodies such as canals, tanks and rivers. The second is barren and unculturable waste — rocky, hilly, mountain and desert land that cannot be farmed even at very high cost.
This category held 44.32 million hectares in 2019-20, about 14.5 per cent of the reporting area. It is the one category that tends to grow, and it grows at cropland’s expense: every new colony, highway or industrial estate converts land that a crop once grew on into land no crop ever will. As towns and industry spread, this quiet transfer steadily nibbles at the net area sown.
The largest amounts of such land lie in states with much desert, rock or mountain, and with fast-spreading settlement — among them Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh.
12.3.5 Permanent Pastures And Other Grazing Lands
Permanent pastures and other grazing lands are areas set aside permanently for animals to graze on. They covered 10.48 million hectares in 2019-20 — barely 3.4 per cent of the reporting area.
That is far too little for a country that keeps one of the world’s largest livestock populations. Much grazing therefore spills onto forests, fallow fields and roadsides wherever grass can be found. The pasture that does exist is unevenly spread: about one-third of the reporting area of Himachal Pradesh, a hill state, is under pasture, while in most of the plains it is under 4 per cent.
The shortage of pasture has a cost. When too many animals feed on too little grass, the ground is stripped bare and begins to erode — a clear case of a resource being used faster than it can renew.
12.3.6 Culturable Waste
Culturable waste (also called cultivable waste) is land that is fit for cultivation but has not been cultivated for the past several years — five years or more. It was farmed once, then abandoned.
Land is abandoned for good reasons: lack of water, salinity or alkalinity of the soil, erosion, waterlogging, an awkward location, or plain neglect. Saline and alkaline tracts locally called reh and usar, and sandy stretches called bhur, in parts of Uttar Pradesh, Punjab and Haryana, were cultivated in the past but had to be given up as faulty farming spoiled the soil.
Culturable waste stood at 11.95 million hectares in 2019-20, well down from about 22.9 million hectares in 1950-51, because reclamation schemes have brought much of it back into use. Reclaiming more could add to India’s cropland. But not all of it should return to the plough — for long-term ecological balance, much of this fragile land is better put under trees than under crops. The National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), Hyderabad, maps these wastelands from satellite images, so that reclamation can be planned where it is safe.
12.3.7 Fallow Land
Fallow land is land that has been cultivated but is left uncultivated for a while, so the soil can recover its fertility. Fallowing is the oldest way of resting tired land, used especially where irrigation and fertiliser are scarce.
Fallow land comes in two kinds. Current fallow is land left uncultivated for a single year — the current season. Fallow other than current fallow is land left idle for more than one year but not more than five; beyond five years it is reclassified as culturable waste. In 2019-20 current fallows covered 13.77 million hectares and fallow other than current fallows 11.24 million hectares.
Some fallowing is healthy, because resting restores the soil. But too much of it, or fallowing that lasts too long, simply shrinks the area under crops and lowers production. The aim, then, is to reduce needless fallow — through irrigation, fertilisers and careful crop rotation — so that land can be kept in steady, productive use rather than lying idle.
12.4 The Quality Of Cultivable Land
Cultivable land is not all equally good. Some of India’s soil ranks among the most fertile in the world, while some land, once fertile, is being ruined. Quality, not just quantity, decides what a field will yield.
12.4.1 Where India’s Fertile Land Lies
India’s richest farmland is the great Northern Plain, and it is fertile because of how it was built. As the Indus, the Ganga and the Brahmaputra and their many tributaries descend from the Himalayas onto the plain, they slow down and drop the fine silt they carry. This deposited silt is alluvium — soft, deep, mineral-rich soil, renewed with every flood. Land built of alluvium is naturally productive, which is why the plain feeds so much of the country.
The deltas are more fertile still. At a river’s mouth, where it meets the sea and drops the last and finest of its load, the soil is finer and richer than in the valleys upstream. The coastal plains, too, carry long stretches of fertile land suited to a wide range of crops.
The plateau has its own gift. On the Deccan, the black lava soil called regur, formed from the slow weathering of volcanic basalt, is deep and holds moisture well. It grows cotton splendidly, with little added fertiliser, and has shown almost no sign of exhaustion even after long cultivation.
Where these fertile belts lie, and where quality is now being lost, is shown together in Map 12.1.
Map
Map 12.1 Caption: India’s most fertile belts, and the tracts where cultivable land is losing its quality. Brief: Outline map of India showing the full extent of India as officially defined by the Government of India, including Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh; all boundaries as officially recognised by the Government of India, none marked as disputed. Shade and label four things: (1) the fertile alluvial belt of the Northern Plains along the Indus–Ganga–Brahmaputra; (2) the major deltas of the east coast; (3) the black-soil (regur) region of the Deccan Plateau; (4) degradation-prone tracts — the waterlogged and saline areas of Punjab and Haryana, and the shifting-cultivation areas of the North-East. The key must clearly separate fertile belts from degradation-prone areas.
12.4.2 Where Land Quality Is Degrading
Not all of India’s land is kind to the farmer. Wide stretches of hill, plateau and mountain are almost barren, too steep or too thin-soiled for crops. On gentler hill slopes, where the climate allows, tea and coffee are grown, and slopes are cut into terraces to make farming possible at all, with rice as the main terraced crop.
In the North-East, land is lost through shifting cultivation — the practice of clearing and burning a patch of forest, cropping it for a few years, then abandoning it as fertility falls and moving on. When the cycle is long, the forest recovers. But where growing population forces farmers to return too soon, the soil never regains its fertility, and cultivable land is damaged beyond repair.
Elsewhere, land is spoiled not by too little care but by too much water. In parts of Punjab and Haryana, canal water applied in excess, year after year, has raised the underground water table close to the surface. The result is waterlogging — soil so saturated that plant roots are starved of air — and salinity, in which water drawn up to the surface evaporates and leaves its dissolved salts behind as a white crust that poisons crops.
Here the account must be balanced. That same canal water drove the Green Revolution and lifted India’s harvests enormously. The trouble is that a good thing, over-applied, turned on the land it had enriched. The lesson of the whole section is the lesson of the chapter: land quality is capital that has to be managed, never simply assumed.
12.5 The Size Of Land Holdings
We come to the last and most stubborn problem of India’s land — not how it is used, but how it is divided among the people who farm it.
12.5.1 Small And Fragmented Holdings
An operational holding is the land actually farmed by a single household, whether it owns the land or leases it. India’s holdings suffer from two linked faults: they are small, and they are fragmented — broken into scattered pieces.
The smallness is easy to measure and hard to reverse. The average operational holding has shrunk steadily, from 2.28 hectares in 1970-71 to 1.82 in 1980-81, 1.5 in 1995-96 and 1.08 hectares in 2015-16 — and it is still falling.
In forty-five years the average farm more than halved, even though India’s total farmland barely changed. The land was not lost; it was divided — the same cropland shared among more and more owners. This is the plain arithmetic behind the puzzle set in the chapter opener.
The problem is not that farms are small on average, but that the smallness is so uneven. Table 12.2 sets out how holdings of different sizes are distributed (Agricultural Statistics at a Glance 2022).
The table tells a story of inequality. Marginal farmers, working below one hectare each, make up more than two-thirds of all holdings, yet between them they hold under a quarter of the farmed land. At the other end, large holdings are barely one in two hundred, but each averages some seventeen hectares. Many tiny farms crowd onto little land; a handful of big ones hold a share out of all proportion to their number.
Smallness is worst in the densely populated, intensively farmed states — Kerala, West Bengal and Bihar — where the average holding is under a hectare and, in places, under half a hectare. Holdings are far larger where population is thin and land less prized: in Nagaland, where shifting cultivation on community land is common, the average runs to about seven hectares.
12.5.2 Why Holdings Fragment
Behind the shrinking farm lies a simple cause: the law of inheritance. When a father’s land is divided equally among his sons, the holding is split at every generation. Farmland that supported one family is soon carved among several, and their children divide it again.
Worse, the land is not merely split into smaller holdings — it is scattered. Because different tracts differ in fertility, fairness demands that each heir receive a piece of every tract. So one holding becomes many small plots spread across the village. This scattering is fragmentation: the breaking of a single holding into numerous small, separated parcels.
Fragmentation quietly drains a farm’s output. Time and labour are wasted carrying seed, manure and cattle from one distant plot to another. Irrigation is awkward on tiny, separated fields. Fertile land is lost to the boundaries and ridges dividing every parcel. And a farmer with a scrap here and a scrap there can neither invest nor improve — so productivity stays low. This, more than any shortage of land, keeps much Indian farming poor.
12.5.3 Consolidation And Cooperative Farming
If fragmentation is the disease, two remedies are usually offered. They work in quite different ways.
The first is consolidation of holdings — reorganising a farmer’s many scattered plots into one compact block, or a few, of equal total value. Instead of a dozen patches spread across the village, the farmer receives one or two workable fields. Almost every state has passed laws for consolidation, but the work has been carried through mainly in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh, where a large number of holdings were consolidated by the early 1990s. Elsewhere it has moved slowly, because rearranging every farmer’s land is a huge and contentious task.
The second is cooperative farming, in which small farmers keep their ownership but voluntarily pool their land, resources and labour, farm it together as one large unit, and share the profit. Pooling lets small owners reach the advantages of large-scale farming — machinery, irrigation, credit — that no single tiny holding could afford.
The two remedies differ at their root. Consolidation rearranges one farmer’s plots into a compact whole, leaving ownership untouched. Cooperative farming leaves the plots as they are but joins many farmers to work them jointly. Consolidation has clearly helped where it was completed, yet has spread little; cooperative farming succeeds only where farmers trust one another enough to pool what they own. Along with steady irrigation, better inputs and legal limits on further sub-division, these are the main routes by which India tries to undo the harm of fragmentation.
12.6 Summary
Development improves human life but draws on the environment, and careless use degrades the very environment that made development possible. Environmental management — planning, review and decision-making to conserve the environment while a society develops — is the response to this tension.
Sustainable development means meeting present needs without compromising the ability of future generations to meet theirs. It comes from the 1987 Brundtland Report, Our Common Future.
The key shift the chapter asks for: treat the environment as capital to be kept whole, not as a resource to be spent. Renewable resources managed within their rate of renewal last indefinitely; exploited for quick gain, the stock collapses.
Land is a land resource — the surface plus its soil, water, vegetation and minerals — valued for what can be done on it. Its supply is fixed while demand rises; that is the root of its problems. Land use varies over space and time because physical factors (relief, soil, climate) and human factors (population, settlement history, land tenure, technology) act together.
India’s total geographical area is about 328.73 million hectares, but land-use records cover a reporting area of about 306.54 million hectares (2019-20). Shares are read against the reporting area.
Net area sown (139.92 million hectares, about 46 per cent of the reporting area) is the actual cropland — a very high share by world standards, but with little scope to expand.
Because cropland cannot grow much, output is raised by sowing land more than once. Net area sown plus area sown more than once gives the gross cropped area (211.36 million hectares); their ratio gives cropping intensity — about 151 per cent in 2019-20.
The other land-use categories each record something: land not available for cultivation (towns, roads, barren rock) grows at cropland’s expense; permanent pastures are far too little for India’s livestock; culturable waste is once-farmed land abandoned to salt, water shortage or neglect; and fallow land — current and other-than-current — is land rested to recover fertility.
Quality matters as much as quantity. India’s most fertile land is alluvium of the Northern Plains, the deltas, and the black regur soil of the Deccan. Land degrades through shifting cultivation in the North-East and through waterlogging and salinity where canal water is over-applied — a reminder that quality is capital to be managed.
India’s holdings are small and fragmented. The average operational holding fell to 1.08 hectares by 2015-16; marginal holdings are over two-thirds of all holdings but work under a quarter of the land. Inheritance divides land equally each generation, scattering it into many small plots, which drains productivity. Consolidation of holdings and cooperative farming are the main remedies.
The land-use classification that holds the chapter together is drawn as one chain in Fig. 12.6-1.
Flowchart
Fig. 12.6-1 Caption: How India’s fixed land is accounted for, and how output is squeezed from the part that is cropped. Nodes: Total geographical area of India (328.73 million ha, fixed) → reporting area for land use (306.54 million ha, 2019-20) → divides into physical parcels → net area sown; forests; land not available for cultivation; permanent pastures and other grazing lands; land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves; culturable waste; current fallows; fallow other than current fallows → these eight sum back to the reporting area. Separate branch from net area sown: net area sown + area sown more than once → gross cropped area (211.36 million ha) → gross cropped area ÷ net area sown × 100 → cropping intensity (about 151 per cent)
What This Chapter Cannot Tell You
Every figure here is a national total, and national totals hide the states and districts inside them — a desert state and a plains state vanish into the same average. The land-use categories tell you how much area is under each use, but not how productive it is, or who gains from it. A once-a-decade census smooths over the year-to-year swings of drought, flood and good harvest. And a single average holding size conceals the wide gulf between the marginal farmer on a third of a hectare and the large holder on seventeen.
12.7 Key Terms
alluvium — Fine, fertile silt dropped by a river as it slows, building deep and productive soil.
area sown more than once — Farmland that carries more than one crop in the same year, counted once for each additional crop.
consolidation of holdings — Reorganising a farmer’s scattered plots into one or a few compact blocks of equal value.
cooperative farming — An arrangement in which small farmers keep ownership but pool their land, resources and labour to farm together and share the profit.
cropping intensity — The gross cropped area as a percentage of the net area sown; a measure of how many crops a field grows in a year.
culturable waste — Land fit for cultivation but left uncultivated for five years or more, usually because it has been degraded or abandoned.
current fallow — Cultivated land left uncultivated for a single year so the soil can recover.
development — The overall improvement in the economic, social and political conditions of a society.
environment — The sum total of the living and non-living conditions that surround life at a given place and time.
environmental management — The process of planning, review, assessment and decision-making that conserves the environment while a society develops.
fallow land — Cultivated land left uncultivated for a time so the soil can recover its fertility.
fallow other than current fallow — Land left uncultivated for more than one year but not more than five; beyond five years it becomes culturable waste.
fragmentation — The breaking of a single holding into many small, scattered parcels.
gross cropped area — The total of all crops grown in a year: net area sown plus area sown more than once (also called total cropped area).
land — The surface together with the soil, water, vegetation and minerals on and beneath it.
land not available for cultivation — Land that cannot be cropped: the ground under settlements, roads and water, and barren, unculturable waste.
land resource — The land available to a society, valued for what can be done on it.
land tenure — The system of who owns land and on what terms.
land use — The way the reporting area is divided among its different uses.
net area sown — The total area actually sown with crops in a year, counted only once even where a field is cropped more than once.
non-renewable resources — Resources such as minerals and fossil fuels that exist as a fixed stock and cannot regrow.
operational holding — The land actually farmed by a single household, whether owned or leased.
permanent pastures and other grazing lands — Land set aside permanently for animals to graze on.
regur — The black, moisture-retentive lava soil of the Deccan, formed from weathered basalt and well suited to cotton.
renewable resources — Resources such as forests, soils and fresh water that renew themselves, but only at a certain rate.
reporting area — The area for which land-use statistics are actually collected.
resource — Something drawn on and spent for use.
salinity — The build-up of salts at the soil surface, left behind as rising water evaporates, which poisons crops.
shifting cultivation — Clearing and burning a patch of forest, cropping it briefly, then abandoning it as fertility falls and moving on.
sustainable development — Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.
waterlogging — Saturation of the soil with water so that plant roots are starved of air.
12.8 Points to Ponder
Soil can take centuries to form but be exhausted in a single generation of careless farming. Does it really make sense to call soil a ‘renewable’ resource — or is it closer to a non-renewable one that happens to renew very slowly?
India ploughs a far larger share of its land than most large countries. Is a very high net area sown a sign of agricultural strength, or the mark of a country that has simply run out of land to spare?
Raising cropping intensity feeds more people from the same fixed land, but it asks each field to give more, more often. Can a field be worked harder and harder forever, or does every gain in intensity borrow something from the future?
Fragmentation grew out of a fair wish — to give every heir an equal share of good land and poor. Consolidation undoes it in the name of efficiency. Can land be both fairly divided among people and efficiently farmed at the same time?
A canal that made a dry district bloom later waterlogged and salted the very same fields. When does using a resource well become using it too much — and is that line one a farmer or a planner could see before it is crossed?
12.9 Objective Questions
- Which land-use category occupies the largest share of India’s reporting area?
- Forests
- Net area sown
- Land not available for cultivation
- Fallow land [1 mark]
- Cropping intensity is calculated as:
- net area sown ÷ gross cropped area × 100
- gross cropped area ÷ net area sown × 100
- area sown more than once ÷ reporting area × 100
- net area sown ÷ reporting area × 100 [1 mark]
- Land left uncultivated for more than one year but not more than five years is classed as:
- current fallow
- culturable waste
- fallow other than current fallow
- net area sown [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): India cannot greatly increase its net area sown. Reason (R): Most of the land not yet cultivated is too steep, too dry or too rocky to plough.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Assertion (A): The environment should be seen as capital rather than as a resource. Reason (R): Capital is a stock meant to be spent quickly for immediate gain.
- Both A and R are true, and R is the correct explanation of A.
- Both A and R are true, but R is not the correct explanation of A.
- A is true but R is false.
- A is false but R is true. [1 mark]
- Match each term in Column I with the correct description in Column II. [4 marks]
| Column I | Column II |
|---|---|
| a. Alluvium | i. black lava soil of the Deccan, well suited to cotton |
| b. Regur | ii. clearing and burning a forest patch, then abandoning it |
| c. Reporting area | iii. the area for which land-use statistics are collected |
| d. Shifting cultivation | iv. fertile silt dropped by rivers on the Northern Plains |
Fill in the blank: The average size of an operational holding in India fell to about ______ hectares in 2015-16. [1 mark]
State whether true or false: Recorded forest area and actual forest cover mean the same thing. [1 mark]
12.10 Check Your Concepts
Define sustainable development. [2 marks]
What is meant by culturable waste? Give one reason why land becomes culturable waste. [2 marks]
Differentiate between current fallow and fallow other than current fallow. [3 marks]
Give three reasons why India’s net area sown has little scope to increase. [3 marks]
Explain why the environment should be viewed as capital rather than as a resource. [3 marks]
Explain how the over-application of canal water degrades cultivable land. Support your answer with an example from India. [4 marks]
‘A very high net area sown proves that India’s farming is strong.’ Evaluate this claim. [4 marks]
Why are Indian land holdings small and fragmented? Describe the causes, the consequences for agricultural productivity, and the main methods used to reduce fragmentation. [6 marks]
Describe the pattern of land utilisation in India. Name the main categories and state what each one records about how the land is used. [6 marks]
12.11 Map, Diagram & Data Interpretation
Refer to Table 12.1. [4 marks]
- Which single category occupies the largest area?
- Calculate forests as a percentage of the reporting area, showing your working.
- State one thing this table does not tell you about how the land is used.
A district reports a net area sown of 50,000 hectares and an area sown more than once of 20,000 hectares. Using the chapter’s relationships, calculate (i) its gross cropped area and (ii) its cropping intensity. Show your working. [3 marks]
Study Map 12.1. [3 marks]
- Name two regions of fertile alluvial soil shown on the map.
- Name one area where cultivable land is degrading, and state the process responsible.
Refer to Table 12.2. [4 marks]
- What share of all holdings are marginal, and what share of the operated area do they work?
- What does this contrast reveal about the way farmland is shared in India?
- The table records holding size — name one thing about a holding that it does not reveal.
With the help of Fig. 12.1-1, explain the two different futures that follow from treating the environment as a resource and from treating it as capital. [3 marks]