Biorejuvination of sodic waste land

Soil sodicity has been a major worldwide problem limiting agricultural production. Most of the earlier work carried out to ameliorate these soils primarily included chemical measures. Since, these chemicals are expensive, governments have been subsidizing it. An environment-friendly and inexpensive approach to tackle this problem is to exploit the use of soil sodicity tolerance or resistance in crops. Uttar Pradesh has the largest area under sodic soils in India and large patches of barren sodic waste lands can still be found despite execution of large scale governmentsupported reclamation programmes. Experiments were conducted in two research farms in Uttar Pradesh to test the potential role of biological reclamation. The results showed that (i) sodic soils, if left undisturbed, get reclaimed by itself, provided no cattle grazing or removal of vegetation from the area takes place, and (ii) there are many tolerant varieties of different crops, which can be grown on these soils and in this process also reclaim the land without any cost.

Biorejuvination of sodic waste lands has not been well recognized till now either by the government or the public. Our studies of 17 years proved that lands reclaimed by these methods did not revert back to soil sodicity, as long as it was kept under cultivation. The approach will lead to a major saving to the government and farmers, increase agricultural production substantially and not cause environmental contamination.