ENVIRONMENTAL STUDIES

Module 6. Social issues and the environment

Lesson 26
WASTELAND RECLAMATION

26.1 Introduction

Reclaiming lands that have been laid waste in an extraction or industrial process is "wasteland reclamation." Strip-mining coal produces wastelands. Using chemicals in an industrial process, then dumping the used chemicals either on the land or into a stream creates wastelands or releasing chemicals into the air in an industrial process can create waste lands. When there is no regulation of wastes disposal by the industry can create wastelands. And finally, nuclear accidents can create wastelands.

Environment keeps changing over time naturally and it is also amenable to changes by human beings. Thanks to scientific and technological developments, our ability to alter the environment has increased tremendously, whereas the capacity of environment to cope with those alterations is limited. Nature's bounty and abundance are disappearing at a rapid rate now in many regions of the world including India due to the human alterations of the environment. All this has brought to the fore the need for protection and preservation of environment and the urgency of developing sound environmental policies and programmes. Without them, development would not only be unsustainable but would be tantamount to retrogression. The challenge of creating and maintaining a sustainable environment is probably the single most pressing issue confronting us today and will remain so in the foreseeable future.

The Department of Land Resources, Ministry of Rural Development and Government of India has identified different types of degraded wastelands and has prepared a Wasteland Atlas of India for the year 2000, with the help of Indian Remote Sensing Satellites. According to their estimates, the degraded wastelands accounted for about 20.16 % of India’s total geographical area. The degraded lands include several types of land such as gullied and /or ravinous land, water-logged and marshy land, land affected by salinity and / or alkalinity, degraded pastures / grazing land, degraded notified forest land, mining industrial wastelands, eroded steep slopping land, sandy and desertic lands, and barren rocky /stony wastelands. Whatever the type of degradation, a common characteristic of degraded lands is that their productivity is almost negligible but it could be restored through proper reclamation measures and management.

It is estimated that in India in 1994, about 188 million ha of land, which is 57 per cent of the country’s total geographical area of about 329 million ha, was degraded. Of the 188 million ha of degraded land, about 149 million ha was affected by water erosion, 13.5 million ha by wind erosion, about 14 million ha by chemical deterioration and 11.6 million ha by water-logging (Sehgal and Abrol, 1994). A recent survey by the National Bureau of Soil Survey and Land Use Planning revealed that 66 per cent of India’s total geographical area (around 192 m ha) was at varying stages of degradation (quoted in Haque, 1997).

Land degradation has significant adverse impacts on crop productivity and the environment. Joshi and Jha (1991) in a study of four villages in Uttar Pradesh found that a 50 per cent decline in crop yields over a period of eight years was due to salinity and water -logging caused by the irrigation system.