A fourth of India turning into desert: ISRO study

SCORCHING EARTH AND SKY: A farmer stands next to a parched paddy field. ISRO holds overexploitation of resources responsible for changes in rainfall patterns. Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra among the affected States. File photo

No less than a fourth of India’s geographical area, or 81 million hectares, is undergoing a process of desertification, reveals a first-of-its-kind ‘desertification status map’ of the country created by the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) in collaboration with several scientific institutions across the country.

A host of reasons are responsible for this phenomenon, including changes in rainfall pattern and over-exploitation of natural resources, says a research paper based on this data and published in the latest issue of Current Science.

The spatial inventory, which uses satellite imagery from an Indian Remote Sensing Satellite, Resourcesat, also reveals that a third of the country’s area (or 105.48 million hectares) is degraded.

At least eight processes were at work, of which water erosion is the most pronounced (affecting 10.21 per cent of the total geographical area), followed by reducing vegetation cover (9.63 per cent) and wind erosion (5.34 per cent). Together 32.07 per cent of the total geographic area is being transformed by land degradation.

State-wise, Rajasthan has the largest area (21.77 per cent of the total geographical area) undergoing land degradation, followed by Jammu and Kashmir (12.79 per cent), Maharashtra (12.66 per cent) and Gujarat (12.72 per cent).

“There is tremendous pressure on our land-based natural resources” say the authors of the paper, adding that this information could serve as baseline data to monitor and develop strategies to arrest desertification. “There has been a long-pending need for a scientific status mapping of desertification and land degradation of the entire country.”

ISRO’s Space Applications Centre in Ahmedabad served as the nodal coordinating organisation for the study.

The spatial inventory, at national and regional levels, will be integrated to generate a desertification status map of the world as envisaged by the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification.

The research paper adds that about 15.8 per cent of the country’s geographical area is arid, 37.6 per cent semi-arid and 16.5 per cent falls in the dry sub-humid region. Put together, about 228 million hectares, or 69 per cent of the country constitute ‘dry land.’