With determination to roll back wastelands for productive use, RD Ministry releases Wastelands Atlas 2019

News Bharati    05-Nov-2019
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New Delhi, November 5: Union Rural Development Minister Narendra Singh Tomar released the Wastelands Atlas 2019 today in New Delhi. The new wastelands mapping exercise, carried out by the National Remote Sensing Centre (NRSC), using the Indian Remote Sensing Satellite data is brought out as the fifth edition of Wastelands Atlas 2019.

 
Unprecedented pressure on the land beyond its carrying capacity is resulting into degradation of lands in the Country. India with 2.4% of total land area of the World is supporting 18% of the World’s population. The per capita availability of agriculture land in India is 0.12ha whereas World per capita agriculture land is 0.29ha. Therefore, robust geospatial information on wastelands assumes significance and effectively helpful in rolling back the wastelands for productive use through various land development programmes. The Atlas provides district and state wise distribution of different categories of wastelands area including mapping of about 12.08 Mha area of Jammu & Kashmir which was yet unmapped.
 
The changes in wastelands between 2008-09 and 2015-16 have been presented in the Atlas. The effort has resulted in estimating the spatial extent of wastelands for entire country to the tune of 55.76 Mha (16.96 %) for the year 2015-16 as compared to 56.60 Mha (17.21%) in the year 2008-09. During this period 1.45 Mha of wastelands are converted into non wastelands categories. 
The wastelands have undergone positive change in the states of Rajasthan, Bihar, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Mizoram, Madhya Pradesh, Jammu & Kashmir and West Bengal. A reduction in wasteland area was observed in the categories of land with dense scrub, waterlogged and marshy land, sandy areas, degraded pastures or grazing land and gullied or ravinous land.