Desert has devoured 12.7% of Gujarat; 69% of India is ‘dry land’

There is good news and there is bad news. The good news is that India now has its first ‘Desertification and Land Degradation’ Atlas. And the bad news is that almost 25% of India’s total geographical area (TGA) is a desert, and 32% of the land is affected by degradation. Further, as much as 69% of the country’s area is classified as ‘dry land’.

This, for a country whose main source of income is agriculture, is really bad news.
The Atlas has been developed by the Space Applications Centre, Ahmedabad, with 17 other national agencies.

They carried out the first-of-its-kind ‘Desertification Status Mapping’ for the entire country, based on scientific methods and using satellite data. The atlas presents state-wise mapping of the status of land degradation and the reasons for it - which include water erosion, vegetal degradation, wind erosion, salinisation/alkanisation, water-logging, frost heaving, frost shattering, and mass movement.

Giving a perspective on the project, its national coordinator, the SAC’s Dr Ajai, says, “The global average of land degradation is 33% of the TGA, so the situation in India is not too bad. But for developing economies like India, land degradation is a severe  problem because there is tremendous pressure on land-based resources,  mainly for agriculture.”

To arrest the increasing land degradation, mitigation agencies require authentic data on the area and spatial distribution of land degradation and the reasons for it.

“For instance, if land is degrading in a certain area because of vegetal degradation and efforts are made to contain soil erosion, the exercise would be pointless. Though there are several scattered reports on land degradation status, this is the first exhaustive baseline data which can be used for future monitoring of desertification,” he explains.

India has been a signatory to the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD) since June 1994. One of the prerequisites for combating desertification is to identify the area undergoing the process of desertification.

However, spatial inventory of land degradation/desertification was not available for the country till now. If this startles you, then it will further surprise you to know that India is led only by four other countries which have already prepared this atlas. India’s map will be integrated into the desertification status map of the world.

Area-wise, Rajasthan accounts for 21.77% desertification of India’s total geographical area; and J&K (12.79%), Gujarat (12.72%) and Maharashtra (12.66%) have the highest proportions of land undergoing degradation. Water erosion has emerged as the main reason for land degradation, having affected 10.21% of country’s TGA, followed by vegetal degradation (9.63%) and wind erosion (5.34%).

“Vulnerability of the land to different forms of degradation is accentuated by high biotic pressure. There is an urgent need to arrest the process of desertification and combat land degradation,” the former ISRO chairman and the secretary, department of space, G Madhavan Nair, states in the preface to the atlas.

“Land degradation and desertification pose an ever increasing global environmental threat. Human activities such as over-cultivation, overgrazing, deforestation and poor irrigation practices, along with climate change, are turning once fertile land into unproductive degraded land,” the SAC director, Dr RR Navalgund, says in the preamble.