Soil Health and Sustainability in India

In-depth resource exploring soil health issues in Indian regions such as the Indian Himalayas and Indo-Gangetic Plains

Soil Health and Sustainability in India delivers a comprehensive overview of the problems surrounding soil health in various regions of India, summarizing the main causes of soil degradation in different agro-climatic regions, documenting both soil degradation and soil health improvements in agricultural systems, looking at how to mitigate soil health hazards including waterlogging, acidity, soil salinity, and soil compaction in India, detailing soil health constraints in different ecoregions of India, and providing potential solutions for enhancing environmental and socio-economic issues in Indian agronomy.

Past and current soil conservation programs in India are reviewed in detail to better understand how production and policy-related issues affect soil and water conservation. Incentives needed to address the most critical problems are discussed. Significant results associated with watershed-scale soil and water conservation programs and interventions, which have been effective in reducing land degradation and improving productivity in different parts of India, are covered, and pervasive physical, chemical, and biological soil health constraints of different ecoregions of India are also presented in detail.

Soil Health and Sustainability in India explores sample topics including:

• Deforestation and removal of natural vegetation through overgrazing and land use change
• Depletion of organic matter in soil, such as through excessive tillage, heavy machinery for harvesting, and lack of adequate soil conservation measures
• Salt pollution from the textile, glass, rubber production, animal hide processing and leather tanning, metal processing, and pharmaceutical industries
• Soil erosion by water, wind, and cyclonic storms, and different types of soil, including brown and red hill soils, alluvium-derived soils, lateritic soils, and podzolic soils

Soil Health and Sustainability in India is a timely, important resource on the subject for soil scientists, agronomists, industry professionals, and students of soil health, crop science, and agriculture seeking to understand India's soil conservation problems and help protect climates from riverine deltas, to high-altitude forests, to peninsular plateaus.