Pressures Driving Land Degradation in India: Unsustainable Management Practices

India holds just 2.4% of the world’s land area, yet supports around 18% of the global population. That’s an extraordinary burden on finite land resources. When management practices fail to respect ecological limits, the result is land degradation – a slow but devastating decline in the land’s ability to support agriculture, forests, and livelihoods. According to ISRO’s Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas, approximately 97.85 million hectares – nearly 29.7% of India’s total geographical area – was degraded as of 2018-19. The pressures driving this crisis are deeply rooted in unsustainable and inappropriate land management practices.

How land degradation manifests in India 🔗

Land degradation in India takes multiple forms, but four processes dominate. Water erosion is the single biggest contributor, responsible for roughly 11% of all degradation across the country. When rain strikes bare or poorly managed soil, it dislodges particles, washes away the nutrient-rich topsoil, and carves out gullies and ravines. The Chambal region – spanning parts of Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Uttar Pradesh – is a textbook example, where severe gully erosion has rendered vast tracts of land completely unproductive.

Wind erosion follows as the second major process, particularly in the arid and semi-arid zones of western India. Strong winds displace soil particles, create shifting sand dunes, and strip away fertile surface layers. Wind erosion accounts for about 5.46% of desertification across the country. Beyond these two, biophysical deterioration – primarily the loss of vegetation cover – and chemical deterioration through salinisation, alkalisation, and acidification further compound the problem.

Vegetation loss: the foundation of degradation 🔗

Vegetation acts as nature’s shield for soil. Tree canopies intercept rainfall, root systems bind soil particles, and leaf litter protects the surface from direct impact. When this cover is removed, land is left exposed to the full force of erosion. In India, vegetation loss happens through several interconnected pathways.

Deforestation and over-extraction 🔗

Deforestation for agriculture, infrastructure, and development is a primary driver. But it’s not just outright forest clearing that causes damage. Cutting trees beyond what foresters call the “silviculturally permissible limit” – the maximum harvest a forest can sustain without long-term decline – degrades forest quality even when the forest technically still exists. On top of this, millions of rural households depend on forests for fuel wood and fodder. When extraction exceeds the forest’s natural regeneration capacity, the result is a gradual thinning of vegetation that leaves soil increasingly vulnerable.

As the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has noted, anthropogenic pressures are reducing both the quantity and quality of India’s forests. Drivers such as grazing pressure, lack of natural regeneration, and short-rotation harvesting are steadily deteriorating forest stocks across the country.

Shifting cultivation 🔗

Shifting cultivation, locally known as jhum, is an age-old practice in India’s northeastern hill states – Nagaland, Mizoram, Manipur, Meghalaya, Tripura, and Arunachal Pradesh. Traditionally, farmers would clear a patch of forest, cultivate it for a year or two, and then move on, allowing the land a fallow period of 10-20 years to regenerate. Under those conditions, the system was reasonably sustainable.

However, growing population pressure has shortened jhum cycles from ten years or more down to just two or three years. This drastically reduced fallow period gives the land no time to recover. The soil loses fertility, erosion accelerates, and what was once a sustainable system becomes a direct driver of degradation. According to a study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, roughly 7.6 million hectares in eastern and northeastern India are under jhum cultivation, and the practice has become largely unsustainable in its current form.

Encroachment and forest fires 🔗

Encroachment into forest lands for farming or settlement directly removes vegetation cover from ecologically sensitive areas. Combined with recurring forest fires – both natural and human-caused – large tracts of forest are degraded each year. Once the canopy is lost, the exposed soil becomes easy prey for wind and water erosion. Overgrazing by livestock compounds this further. When animals repeatedly graze beyond the carrying capacity of grasslands and forest fringes, the vegetation cannot regenerate, leading to compacted, barren soil.

Agricultural mismanagement: when farming harms the land 🔗

Agriculture uses approximately 141 million hectares out of India’s 328.7 million hectares. Given this massive footprint, the way farmland is managed directly determines whether the land stays productive or degrades. Unfortunately, several common agricultural practices are doing more harm than good.

Cultivation on marginal lands 🔗

One significant pressure is the extension of cultivation to lands with low agricultural potential or those naturally prone to hazards like flooding, steep slopes, or poor soil. When farmers – often out of sheer necessity – bring such marginal lands under the plough, the thin or fragile soils degrade rapidly. Without the natural vegetation that once held them together, these lands erode quickly and may become permanently unproductive.

Poor soil conservation and crop management 🔗

Even on reasonably good agricultural land, the non-adoption of soil conservation measures takes a heavy toll. Practices like contour ploughing, terracing, and vegetative barriers can dramatically reduce erosion, yet they remain under-implemented across large parts of the country. Similarly, improper crop rotation – growing the same crop season after season – depletes specific nutrients from the soil, reduces organic matter, and makes the land more susceptible to both erosion and disease.

The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) has highlighted that rainfed agriculture, which spans 60% of India’s total cropped area, faces a particular challenge. Soils in these areas cannot fully benefit from chemical fertilisers, yet they receive very little support for locally validated fertility-enhancing practices like crop residue incorporation, composting, or farmyard manure application.

Indiscriminate use of agrochemicals 🔗

The excessive and unbalanced use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides is another major driver of chemical land degradation. While agrochemicals can boost short-term yields, their overuse damages soil biology, alters soil pH, destroys beneficial microorganisms, and leads to build-up of toxic residues. Over time, this chemically degraded soil loses its natural fertility and structure. A peer-reviewed study in the journal Sustainability identifies excessive tillage, unbalanced fertiliser use, and pesticide overuse as key inappropriate agricultural practices driving soil degradation across India.

Irrigation failures and groundwater depletion 🔗

Improper planning and management of irrigation systems creates its own set of problems. Poorly designed canal networks without adequate drainage lead to waterlogging and the accumulation of salts on the soil surface – a process called secondary salinisation. This is visible in canal command areas of Rajasthan, particularly those irrigated by the Indira Gandhi Canal, where waterlogging and salinisation have rendered significant farmland unproductive.

At the other extreme, excessive groundwater extraction beyond natural recharge capacity is depleting aquifers across India. When groundwater levels drop, the soil dries out, wells fail, and farmers are left with few options. In coastal areas, over-extraction also leads to seawater intrusion, contaminating freshwater sources with salt. TERI’s research points out that policies like free electricity and free irrigation water, while well-intentioned, often encourage over-extraction and worsen the cycle of degradation.

Indirect pressures: the socioeconomic roots of degradation 🔗

Unsustainable practices don’t happen in a vacuum. Behind the visible forms of degradation lie deeper socioeconomic pressures that push people toward harmful land-use decisions.

Land shortage and fragmentation 🔗

Land shortage is a fundamental issue. India’s per capita land availability has been shrinking steadily as the population grows. About 80% of farm holdings in India are 2 hectares or less. These small and fragmented holdings create intense economic pressure. Farmers on tiny plots often cannot afford soil conservation structures, green manuring, or longer fallow periods. The result, as documented in research, is that land shortage and poverty together drive non-sustainable management practices.

Insecure land tenure and open access resources 🔗

Insecure land tenancy is a powerful disincentive for conservation. When farmers don’t have guaranteed long-term access to the land they cultivate, they have little reason to invest in its long-term health. Why build terraces or plant cover crops on land you might lose next season? This creates a tragic cycle where the most vulnerable farmers, who depend most on the land, are the least able to protect it.

Open access resources – common lands, forests, and grazing areas that lack effective community governance – face a similar problem. Without clear ownership or management rules, these lands are exploited by everyone and maintained by no one. The UNDP has observed that unsustainable land management practices, especially deforestation and overgrazing, have been both cause and consequence of the livelihoods crisis among tribal and rural communities living in and around forest areas.

Poverty and economic dependence on agriculture 🔗

Poverty among agriculture-dependent populations is perhaps the most stubborn underlying pressure. When daily survival is the priority, long-term land health takes a backseat. Poor farmers often cannot access improved seeds, organic inputs, or technical advice. They may be forced to cultivate every last inch of marginal land, extract fuel wood beyond sustainable limits, or skip fallow periods that the land desperately needs. A TERI study estimates that land degradation costs India approximately 2.5% of its GDP – a loss that falls disproportionately on the poorest communities who can least afford it.

The interconnected nature of these pressures 🔗

What makes land degradation particularly difficult to address is that these pressures don’t act in isolation. Poverty forces farmers onto marginal lands. Insecure tenure discourages conservation investment. Overgrazing strips vegetation, which accelerates erosion, which reduces soil fertility, which deepens poverty – and the cycle continues. Meanwhile, water erosion remains the dominant physical process, worsened by every upstream removal of tree cover, every unprotected slope, and every season of bare soil left exposed to monsoon rains.

India’s land management also suffers from a fragmented institutional approach. Land management is a state subject, and cultivable land-use decisions rest with individual owners. Different government departments – agriculture, forests, rural development – often work in silos, with limited coordination. This sectoral fragmentation makes it challenging to implement the kind of integrated landscape management that the problem demands.

Addressing these pressures will require more than technical fixes. It calls for secure land rights, stronger community governance of common resources, economic support for sustainable farming transitions, and a coordinated policy framework that treats land as the multi-dimensional resource it truly is.

What do you think? In a country where millions of small farmers depend on shrinking land for their survival, how can we balance the immediate need for food production with the long-term need to protect soil health? And whose responsibility should it be – farmers, governments, or communities – to lead the shift toward sustainable land management?

References

1. https://www.downtoearth.org.in/climate-change/despite-pm-modi-s-assurance-land-degradation-desertification-increasing-78586
2. https://www.drishtiias.com/daily-updates/daily-news-analysis/land-degradation-and-desertification-in-india
3. https://www.fao.org/india/news/detail-events/en/c/1697185/
4. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jhum
5. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/ecology-and-evolution/articles/10.3389/fevo.2023.1088796/full
6. https://www.teriin.org/article/reversing-land-degradation-india
7. https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/4/3528
8. https://www.adaptation-undp.org/hazards-addressed/land-degradation-and-deforestation
9. https://www.teriin.org/sites/default/files/2018-04/Vol%20I%20-%20Macroeconomic%20assessment%20of%20the%20costs%20of%20land%20degradation%20in%20India_0.pdf
10. https://www.drishtiias.com/current-affairs-news-analysis-editorials/news-editorials/27-02-2024