Department of Geography - Special Lecture

The Department of Geography, Loreto College organized a Special Lecture entitled “Legacy and Digital Datasets: Scale and Resolution of Spatio-temporal Changes in Soil and Land in India” on March 25, 2023. Dr. Nirmalya Chatterjee, Fellow, Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and Environment, Bengaluru was the resource person.

Dr. Chatterjee stressed the importance of assessing soil health with respect to biological health and its responses to microclimatic changes, both of which are key for creating knowledge, information, and intervention resilience in the farming systems. He highlighted that private operators have recently embarked on the precision-agriculture domain, creating a business model out of providing soil nutrient and conditioning data using locally collected samples and soil parameter databases. Unfortunately, these app-based and technology-driven programmes introduce another expenditure to already debt-laden farmers and create additional dependence on an external service – a situation already prevalent in farms that have heavily adopted Green Revolution model farming based on hybrid seeds, synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and extensive ground water mining using fossil energy. This externality-driven model is thus problematic from both economic and ecological perspectives since it violates the concept of circularity in folk and traditional agricultural practices.

Dr. Chatterjee discussed the need to create a single window platform on available soil, land, and hydrological datasets in India for the use of agricultural and allied sectors, and to enable data access to individual- or household-level stakeholders at subsistence, marginal market-exposed, and commercial levels. Discussions and ideas were exchanged on creating a free and public data access portal using available domestic and inter-governmental datasets, with the opportunity for progressive and near real-time data quality improvement using multiple sources.