His expertise as a soil scientist has helped to grow crops in Africa and also other parts of the world. An award-winning Indian-American scientist Rattan Lal, who hails from the Punjab, is keen to share his knowledge with the India to boost soil health and also productivity, but sadly, he said, no one is interested in it.

“The trouble with India is that nobody listens. But here (abroad), people listen,” Lal, a Distinguished University Professor at the Ohio State University, told to IANS on the sidelines of an international conference here.

Lal studied at the Punjab Agricultural University (PAU) and the Indian Agricultural Research Institute in the 1960’s. The septuagenarian is a recipient of the MS Swaminathan award and also the Norman Borlaug award. He said that he tried to reach out to the then Manmohan Singh government and also the ruling NDA with his offer of help, but to no avail.

Lal, who is a Director of the university’s Carbon Management and Sequestration Centre, said that his extensive work in Nigeria in the 1970’s and 1980’s at an institute which was part of the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research focused on the impact of deforestation on the climate change.

“The study centred on run-off erosion, drought stress and soil degradation for the whole of Africa and the humid tropics,” said Lal on the sidelines of the Crans Montana Forum on Africa and South-South Cooperation, where he was invited to read the paper.

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According to Lal, this method of agriculture is being followed in the Ohio, where the “soil has not been ploughed since 1960”.

Lal said that in India, crop residue was burnt or fed to the cattle. The land gets nothing in back, the soil is also depleted. Carbon content in the top soil should be two per cent/100 gm of the soil. But in the states of Punjab, Haryana and Uttar Pradesh, it is just 0.05 per cent.

This leads to the fertiliser and pesticides leaching into the groundwater, that causes cancer. “This is a serious problem,” he said, adding to that he had met the then Planning Commission Deputy Chairperson Montek Singh Ahluwalia and told him that the crop residue and also dung should “go back” into the land. But he did not have the time to listen.

When the Narendra Modi government took the charge, he attempted to meet the Prime Minister on this subject. “We tried to fix an appointment with (External Affairs Minister) Sushma Swaraj last year, but it did not materialise,” he said.

According to Lal, even brick kilns should be banned as the brick-makers use valuable top soil where all nutrients reside, which it takes thousands of years to enrich the soil. — IANS

Mrudula Duddempudi.