Chapter 3 — Lesson 2 ଭୂ ସମ୍ବଳ

Of all natural resources, land is the most basic. It is the surface on which every human activity takes place. We live on land, we perform our economic activities on it, and we use it in different ways. It supports natural vegetation, wildlife, human life, economic activities, transport and communication systems. Farms, forests, pastures, mines, cities, roads and railways all occupy land. Water itself is collected, stored and distributed on land. Hence land is called the mother of all resources.

Two features make land unlike most other resources. First, it is an asset of a finite magnitude. The area of the earth's surface is fixed; the area of India is fixed at about 32.8 lakh square kilometres and that of Odisha at about 1.56 lakh square kilometres. We cannot make more land. Whatever is used for one purpose cannot at the same time be used for another, and land once spoiled by erosion, salinity or mining takes generations to recover. Second, land carries a very heavy load in India. The country has about 2.4 per cent of the world's land area but supports nearly 18 per cent of its population and about 15 per cent of its livestock. Every hectare must therefore produce far more than the world average, and the pressure of a growing population and expanding cities on a fixed area is one of the central problems of Indian geography.

It follows that land must be used carefully and with planning. The questions that guide this lesson are: what kinds of land does India have, how is that land being used, is the pattern of use wise, what damage has been done, and how can land be conserved.

The use of land is determined by two sets of factors. Physical factors include topography or relief, climate, soil types and the availability of water. A steep mountain slope cannot be a paddy field; a desert cannot be a forest without water; black soil favours cotton and alluvial soil favours rice and wheat. Human factors include population density, technological capability, culture, traditions and the historical pattern of settlement. Dense population turns forest into farmland; irrigation technology turns dry land into cropped land; the tradition of sacred groves keeps some forest intact. Land use is thus a product of the interaction of nature and society, exactly as the unit has taught for resources in general.

In Odisha the importance of land is heightened by the fact that nearly three-quarters of the people depend on agriculture and allied activities, and that the state's forests, minerals and rivers all compete for the same limited surface. Understanding how the state's land is divided and used is the first step in planning its future.

The first physical factor in land use is relief, the shape of the land surface. India has a great variety of relief, and it is usual to describe the country in three broad classes.

Plains cover about 43 per cent of the land area. The great northern plain of the Indus, Ganga and Brahmaputra, the coastal plains of the east and west, and the deltas of the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri are the chief plains. Their alluvial soil is deep and fertile, their surface is level, water is available from rivers and wells, and transport is easy. Plains are therefore the most intensively farmed and most densely populated parts of the country and the sites of most cities and industries. They provide the facilities for agriculture and industry.

Mountains account for about 30 per cent of the land area. The Himalaya in the north, the Purvanchal hills in the north-east, and the ranges of the peninsula, the Aravalis, Vindhyas, Satpuras, Western and Eastern Ghats, belong here. Mountains cannot be farmed except on terraces in valleys, but they are of vital importance. They ensure the perennial flow of rivers, since glaciers and monsoon rains on their slopes feed the streams; they are the source of most of the country's forests and wildlife; they hold minerals; they are the home of many tribal communities; and they provide facilities for tourism and other ecological services such as regulating climate and holding soil.

Plateaus make up about 27 per cent of the area. The Deccan plateau, the Chota Nagpur plateau, the Malwa plateau and the tablelands of central India and Odisha are the main ones. They are old, hard, level or gently rolling uplands with thin soils, and they possess rich reserves of minerals, fossil fuels and forests. Most of India's coal, iron ore, bauxite and manganese lies under the plateaus, and their forests are extensive. Agriculture on plateaus is limited by thin soil and low water availability, though the black soils of the Deccan support cotton and the red soils of the eastern plateaus support millets and rice where water can be had.

This division explains a great deal about land use. Because plains are the most productive, they are the most crowded and the most contested between farms and cities. Because mountains and plateaus are less farmable, they hold most of the forest and minerals, and much of the conflict between mining, forest protection and tribal rights takes place there.

In Odisha the same three classes appear in miniature. The coastal plain, about a fifth of the state, is the crowded farming belt; the northern plateau and the Eastern Ghats hold the forests, minerals and tribal population; and the central tableland lies between. The lesson will return to this in its discussion of Odisha's land use.

Relief decides what is physically possible; climate, soil and water decide what is actually grown or done on the land.

Climate matters mainly through rainfall and temperature. India is a monsoon country in which rain is concentrated in four months and varies from over 400 centimetres in Meghalaya to under 20 in western Rajasthan. Where rain is heavy and reliable, as on the coasts and in the north-east, rice, plantations and dense forest dominate. Where it is moderate, wheat, millets, pulses and oilseeds prevail, and forests are deciduous or thorny. Where it is scanty, land lies as pasture or desert, and cultivation depends entirely on irrigation. Temperature sets the number of crops: in the warm plains and coasts crops grow the year round, so two or three crops are possible if water is available; in the cold mountains only a short summer crop can be raised. The frequency of floods, droughts and cyclones also affects how land is used; in coastal Odisha the fear of cyclone and flood shapes what farmers plant and when.

Soil is the layer on which crops feed. Deep alluvial soil supports intensive rice and wheat; black soil holds moisture and grows cotton and pulses; red and laterite soils are poorer and need manure and irrigation for good yields; mountain and desert soils support little. The soils of India are the subject of the next lesson, but their effect on land use is visible in every district: the alluvial deltas of Odisha are cropped intensively, the red soils of the interior support one rain-fed crop, and the laterite caps of the plateau edges stay under scrub and forest.

Water is the limiting resource for land use in most of India. A given piece of land yields far more with irrigation than without, and irrigation converts single-cropped into double-cropped land, dry land into wet, and pasture into farm. The spread of canals in Punjab and tube-wells in the Gangetic plain transformed their land use in a generation; the Hirakud canals did the same for the Sambalpur-Bargarh plain in Odisha. Where water is absent the land may be physically suitable but economically unusable.

The human factors then act within these physical limits. Population density pushes cultivation onto poorer and steeper land; technology, from tractors to hybrid seeds to drip irrigation, raises the yield of every hectare; culture and tradition preserve sacred groves, favour particular crops and shape the pattern of villages; and history has left India with a land tenure system and a road and canal network that guide present use. In every region the land use we observe is the joint result of all these forces.

To study how land is used, the government collects land use statistics through the revenue records of villages, maintained by the land revenue department. India's land use is recorded under a set of standard categories, and a student must know each of them precisely, because examination questions turn on their meaning.

Forests. Land classed as forest under any legal enactment or administered as forest, whether or not it actually has tree cover. Note that this is the area of forest according to records, which differs from the actual forest cover measured by satellites.

Land not available for cultivation, which is of two kinds. Barren and waste land includes rocky outcrops, deserts, ravines, mountain slopes and other land that cannot be cultivated except at a prohibitive cost. Land put to non-agricultural uses covers settlements, buildings, roads, railways, canals, industries and water bodies.

Other uncultivated land, excluding fallow land, has three parts. Permanent pastures and grazing land is used for grazing livestock. Land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves, not included in the net sown area, carries orchards, bamboo groves, casuarina and the like. Culturable waste land is land available for cultivation but not cultivated for more than five years; it can be brought under the plough with some effort.

Fallow lands are of two kinds. Current fallow is land left without cultivation for one agricultural year or less, usually to restore fertility. Other than current fallow is land left uncultivated for the past one to five years.

Net sown area is the physical extent of land on which crops are sown and harvested at least once in a year. The area sown more than once in a year is added to the net sown area to give the gross cropped area. If a field is sown twice, it is counted once in net sown area and twice in gross cropped area.

Two derived measures are important. Cropping intensity is the gross cropped area expressed as a percentage of the net sown area; it measures how many times land is cropped in a year. If net sown area is 100 hectares and gross cropped area is 140, cropping intensity is 140 per cent. The reporting area is the total area for which land use data are available; in India it is slightly less than the geographical area because records for parts of the north-east and for some other areas are incomplete. Percentages of land use are normally calculated on the reporting area.

These categories will be used in the next section to read the land use pattern of India, and in the section after that to read Odisha's.

Applying these categories to the whole country produces the land use pattern of India. The figures below are rounded from recent land use statistics and the student should learn the proportions rather than the decimals.

The total geographical area of India is 32.8 lakh square kilometres, but land use data are available for about 93 per cent of it, the reporting area, because the land use reporting for most of the north-eastern states except Assam has not been done fully, and some areas of Jammu and Kashmir occupied by Pakistan and China are not surveyed.

Of the reporting area, the net sown area is about 46 per cent. It is highest in Punjab and Haryana, above 80 per cent, and lowest in Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands, below 10 per cent. The area sown more than once adds about 24 per cent, so the gross cropped area is about 200 million hectares against a net sown area of about 140 million hectares, giving a cropping intensity of roughly 140 per cent.

Land under forest according to records is about 22 to 23 per cent. This is far below the 33 per cent that the National Forest Policy of 1952, reaffirmed in 1988, considered essential for maintaining ecological balance. Much of the recorded forest, moreover, has poor or no tree cover.

Land not available for cultivation takes about 14 per cent, of which land under non-agricultural uses is about 9 per cent and barren and waste land about 5 per cent. The non-agricultural share grows every year as cities, roads and industries expand, most of it at the expense of good farm land near towns.

Permanent pastures and grazing land is only about 3 per cent, an extremely small area for a country with the world's largest livestock population; most animals graze on fallows, forests and roadsides. Land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves is about 1 per cent, and culturable waste land about 4 per cent. Fallow land, current and other, together comes to about 8 per cent; a part of this could be cultivated with better water management.

Two conclusions follow. First, the net sown area, though large, cannot expand much further; the only ways to raise output are higher yield and higher cropping intensity through irrigation. Second, the forest share is too low, and the pasture share is far too low, which means that livestock and fuel needs put pressure on the forests that remain. The pattern of land use in India, in short, is one of very intensive use of a limited area, with too little of the land under the forest and grass that protect soil and water.

The land use pattern is not fixed; it changes with population, technology and policy. Comparing the records of 1960-61 with those of recent years shows several clear trends, and each trend has a cause and a consequence.

Net sown area has stayed almost constant. It rose from about 41 per cent to about 46 per cent of the reporting area between 1950 and 1970 as wasteland, forest and fallow were brought under the plough, and it has stayed close to that level since. There is little land left to bring in. The increase in food production since 1970 has come almost entirely from higher yields and from the rise in cropping intensity, which increased from about 111 per cent in 1950-51 to about 140 per cent today, mainly through irrigation.

Forest area in the records has risen slightly, from about 18 per cent to about 22 per cent, mainly because more land was legally classed as forest, not because trees grew on it. The actual forest cover measured by satellites fell sharply until the 1980s and has recovered slowly since, to about 21.7 per cent of the geographical area in the 2021 assessment, with total forest and tree cover about 24.6 per cent, still short of the 33 per cent goal.

Land under non-agricultural uses has grown steadily, from about 5 per cent to about 9 per cent, and continues to grow, as towns, industrial estates, highways, railways, airports, canals and reservoirs spread. Since these come up mostly on flat, well-connected, irrigated land near cities, the loss is of the best agricultural land, not the worst.

Pastures have declined from about 5 per cent to about 3 per cent, encroached by cultivation and settlement, even as the livestock population has grown. Grazing pressure has therefore shifted to forests and commons.

Barren and waste land and culturable waste have declined as reclamation and irrigation brought part of them into use, while fallow land has fluctuated with rainfall and, in some regions, risen as farming became unprofitable or water ran short.

These trends point to the central issue of land planning in India: a fixed area under rising demand from agriculture, forestry, grazing, industry and settlement all at once. Every gain in one category is a loss in another. The task of a land use policy is to decide these trade-offs consciously, to protect the best farm land from being built over, to expand forest on land unsuited to farming, to recover culturable waste, and to keep the productive land productive. Odisha faces the same trends with its own emphasis, as the next section shows.

Odisha covers about 1,55,707 square kilometres, about 4.7 per cent of India's area, and its land falls into four natural regions that govern its use.

The coastal plain stretches for about 480 kilometres from the Subarnarekha in the north to the Rushikulya in the south and is widest, about 100 kilometres, in the Mahanadi-Brahmani-Baitarani delta. It is built of alluvium brought by the rivers and is the youngest, flattest and most fertile land in the state. It carries the densest population, the most intensive paddy cultivation, the state's towns and ports, and along the shore a fringe of sand dunes, lagoons such as Chilika, mangrove swamps such as Bhitarkanika and casuarina plantations. Its problems are floods, cyclones, salinity and the loss of farmland to towns and prawn ponds.

The middle mountainous and highland region, the Eastern Ghats and their outliers, covers about three-quarters of the state's area in the districts of Koraput, Rayagada, Kalahandi, Kandhamal, Gajapati, Nabarangpur and Malkangiri in the south and south-west, and Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar and Sundargarh in the north. The land is hilly with elevations up to about 1,500 metres at Deomali in Koraput, the highest point of the state. It is heavily forested, rich in bauxite, iron, manganese and chromite, thinly settled and largely tribal. Cultivation is confined to valleys and to shifting cultivation on slopes.

The central plateaus or tableland, of Angul, Dhenkanal, Boudh, Sonepur, Balangir and Bargarh, are rolling uplands between the hills and the plain, between about 150 and 600 metres in elevation. They carry the coal of Talcher and the Ib valley, mixed forests, and, where irrigated by Hirakud, some of the best rice land in western Odisha.

The western rolling uplands and flood plains of the Mahanadi, Brahmani and Baitarani valleys inland from the delta, including Sambalpur, Jharsuguda and parts of Cuttack and Jajpur, are undulating lands of red and lateritic soil with river alluvium along the valleys.

Elevation and slope decide the use. Below about 150 metres on level land, wet rice dominates; on the gentle uplands, rain-fed rice, millets, pulses and oilseeds with forest patches; on the steep hills, forest, mining and shifting cultivation. The state's forests, minerals and tribal population are concentrated in the highlands; its farms, towns and industries in the plain and the tableland. This uneven spread is the geographical root of the state's land questions: how to protect the hills while mining them, how to keep the plain in food while towns grow on it, and how to bring the uplands into productive use without stripping their soil.

Odisha's land use, read from the state's records, differs from the national pattern in ways that follow directly from its relief and population.

Forest is the largest category. The recorded forest area is about 58,000 square kilometres, about 37 per cent of the geographical area, against about 22 to 23 per cent for India. The Forest Survey's satellite assessment of 2021 put actual forest cover at about 52,000 square kilometres or about 33.5 per cent, one of the highest proportions among the larger states. Forest is concentrated in the highlands of the north and south-west, in Mayurbhanj, Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Kandhamal, Koraput, Rayagada, Kalahandi and Gajapati.

Net sown area is about 55 to 60 lakh hectares, roughly 36 to 38 per cent of the reporting area, well below India's 46 per cent, because so much of the state is hill and forest. The cultivated land lies mainly in the coastal plain, the Mahanadi valley and the Hirakud command. Only about a third of it is irrigated, so the cropping intensity is about 160 per cent in the irrigated delta and Hirakud areas but low in the rain-fed uplands, giving a state figure of about 150 per cent. Rice occupies about two-thirds of the gross cropped area, which is why Odisha is called a rice state.

Land not available for cultivation is high, about 12 to 13 per cent, because of the barren rocky hills and the growing area under towns, mines, industries, roads and reservoirs; Hirakud alone submerged over 700 square kilometres. Permanent pastures are about 3 to 4 per cent, similar to India. Culturable waste and fallows together are about 8 to 10 per cent, higher than desirable, concentrated in the drought-prone western districts where uncertain rain leaves land uncultivated, and in the lateritic uplands where soil is poor.

Read together, the figures say that Odisha is a state where the farmed area is small and heavily dependent on rain, the forest area is large but under pressure from mining and encroachment, and a good deal of land lies as waste and fallow that could be recovered with water and soil treatment. The regional contrast is sharp: the coastal districts of Puri, Jagatsinghpur, Kendrapara, Bhadrak and Balasore have over half their area sown and little forest, while Kandhamal, Gajapati and Malkangiri have most of their area under forest and hills and less than a fifth under crops.

The consequences for planning are clear: expand irrigation to raise cropping intensity rather than trying to plough more forest; recover culturable waste and fallow in the west through watershed development; protect the coastal farm land from urban sprawl and prawn ponds; and keep the forest share, which is the state's ecological and tribal lifeline, from falling as mines and industries grow.

Land that has been in continuous use for thousands of years without proper care has, in many places, lost its productive quality. Land degradation is the decline in the productive capacity of land through the loss of soil, the loss of nutrients, the deposit of salts or chemicals, waterlogging, or the physical destruction of the surface. Degraded land yields less, holds less water, and in the worst cases becomes waste.

The extent of the problem in India is serious. Estimates of the country's degraded land range from about 130 million hectares, the figure most commonly used in school geography, to higher figures depending on the definition, which is roughly 40 per cent of the geographical area. Of this, about 28 per cent belongs to the category of forest degraded area, about 56 per cent is water-eroded area, and the rest is affected by saline and alkaline deposits and by wind erosion. In other words, the greater part of the degradation is caused by the removal of soil by running water, followed by the thinning of forests and the poisoning of soil by salts.

The distribution of the damage follows the causes. Water erosion is worst on the deforested slopes of the Himalaya and the peninsular hills, in the ravines of the Chambal and the Yamuna, and on the sloping red and lateritic lands of the eastern plateaus including western Odisha. Wind erosion dominates in Rajasthan, Gujarat and Haryana, where sand blows across the fields. Salinity and alkalinity are the curse of the over-irrigated canal commands of Punjab, Haryana, western Uttar Pradesh and parts of Maharashtra and Andhra Pradesh, and of the coastal belts where sea water enters the soil, including the Odisha coast. Waterlogging occurs wherever canals leak into flat land with poor drainage. Mining degradation scars Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Madhya Pradesh and Goa. Chemical and industrial pollution of soil surrounds cities and industrial belts.

In Odisha the state's own estimates place a large part of the area in one or another degraded category: eroded uplands in the west and the Eastern Ghats, degraded forest across the highlands, mined-out land in Keonjhar, Sundargarh, Jajpur, Angul and Koraput, saline land in the coastal districts, and waterlogged land in the delta and parts of the Hirakud command. The loss is not only of crops but of the ecological services that land provides: the holding of rain, the recharge of groundwater, the shelter of wildlife. Degraded land also sends its soil into rivers and reservoirs, shortening the life of dams such as Hirakud through siltation.

Land degradation is thus both an economic and an environmental problem, and its causes, which the next section sets out, are almost all human.

Natural forces such as heavy rain, wind, floods and landslides do erode land, but the rapid degradation of recent times is the work of human activity. The main causes are the following.

Deforestation. Removal of tree cover exposes the soil to rain and wind. On slopes the topsoil is washed away within a few seasons, leaving bare rock or gullies; on plains the loss is slower but steady. Forests have been cleared for farming, for timber, for fuel, for mines and for reservoirs. In Odisha the felling of forests in the upper catchments of the Mahanadi and Brahmani is the chief cause of the erosion of the western uplands and of the silting of Hirakud and Rengali.

Over-grazing. With pastures at only about 3 per cent of the land and livestock numbers among the largest in the world, animals graze the same patches too heavily and too often. Grass cannot recover, hooves compact the soil, and bare ground erodes. Over-grazing is the main cause of degradation in Gujarat, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, and it is common on the commons of western Odisha.

Mining and quarrying. Mining removes the surface entirely and leaves deep pits, heaps of overburden and scars. Once the mine is abandoned the site is often left without any attempt at restoration. The dumping of mine waste in valleys buries farm land and pollutes streams. In Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Madhya Pradesh and Odisha, deforestation for open-cast mining has caused severe degradation; in Odisha the iron ore belt of Keonjhar and Sundargarh, the chromite valley of Sukinda, the coal fields of Talcher and Ib valley and the bauxite plateaus of Koraput all show it.

Over-irrigation and faulty irrigation. Where canal water is applied in excess on flat land with poor drainage, the water table rises, the root zone becomes waterlogged, and as the water evaporates it leaves salts on the surface. This has degraded large areas in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh and parts of the Hirakud command in Odisha.

Shifting cultivation. In the hills of Odisha, called podu, forest is cut and burnt for a crop or two and abandoned. When the cycle was long the forest recovered; with growing population the cycle has shortened to a few years and the slopes are left bare and eroded.

Industrial and urban waste. Industrial effluents discharged onto land and into streams, fly ash from thermal plants, and the dust and slag from cement, ceramic, brick and mineral processing units contaminate the soil around them. Cities dump solid waste on their outskirts and spread over farm land. The grinding of limestone for cement and the processing of soapstone and other minerals generate dust that settles on the land and stops water from infiltrating the soil.

Excessive use of chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Continuous heavy use without organic manure acidifies or hardens the soil and kills the organisms that keep it alive, reducing fertility over time.

Each of these causes is reversible if addressed, which is the subject of the next section.

Because the causes of degradation are human, so are the remedies. The measures fall into two groups: preventing further degradation and reclaiming land already degraded.

Afforestation and proper management of forests. The most effective single measure is to replace tree cover on slopes and catchments. Trees break the force of rain, their roots bind the soil, and their litter builds humus. Afforestation of degraded forest land, plantations on wastelands, and the protection of natural regeneration through joint forest management have restored large areas in Odisha's highlands. Social forestry on village commons and roadsides adds fuel and fodder and reduces pressure on natural forest.

Planting of shelter belts. Rows of trees planted across the direction of the prevailing wind reduce wind erosion in dry regions and protect coastal fields from salt-laden winds and cyclones. Odisha's coastal casuarina belts, planted after the 1999 super cyclone, are shelter belts of this kind.

Control of over-grazing. Regulating the number of animals, rotating grazing among pastures, stall-feeding, and developing fodder plantations allow grass cover to recover.

Stabilisation of sand dunes by growing thorny bushes in desert regions.

Proper management of wastelands. Culturable waste can be brought under crops or trees through levelling, bunding and water harvesting; barren land can be planted with hardy species.

Control of mining activities. Mining leases should require the filling of pits, the reshaping and planting of overburden dumps, and the restoration of the land after closure. Odisha's mine closure rules and the rehabilitation of some mined areas in Keonjhar are steps in this direction.

Proper discharge and disposal of industrial effluents and wastes after treatment, and the use of fly ash in bricks and cement instead of dumping it, keep soil from being poisoned.

Improved farming practices. Contour ploughing, terracing and bunding on slopes hold soil and water; crop rotation, green manure and organic manure maintain fertility; drip and sprinkler irrigation and proper drainage prevent waterlogging and salinity; gypsum treatment reclaims alkaline soils; leaching and drainage reclaim saline ones. Settling shifting cultivators with permanent terraced fields and horticulture, as attempted in Koraput and Kandhamal, stops the podu cycle.

Watershed development. Treating a whole catchment together, with check dams, contour trenches, plantations and farm ponds, so that rain is caught where it falls, is the most comprehensive approach and has been applied in the drought-prone western districts of Odisha under national watershed programmes.

These measures work only when the people who use the land take part in them, which is why community participation, from forest committees to watershed committees, is now built into every programme. Land conservation is not a departmental task alone; it is the daily practice of every farmer, herder and village.

How land is owned affects how it is used and cared for, so a lesson on land resources must touch on land reforms and land use policy.

At independence, much of India's farm land was held by zamindars and other intermediaries who did not farm it, while the cultivators were tenants with no security. Land reforms after 1950 had four aims. The abolition of intermediaries gave ownership to the actual cultivators; Odisha passed its Estates Abolition Act in 1951. Tenancy reforms gave tenants security and fair rent; the Orissa Land Reforms Act of 1960, amended in the 1970s, is the state's main law. Ceilings on land holdings limited the area a family could own, with surplus land distributed to the landless. Consolidation of holdings gathered a farmer's scattered fragments into one or a few plots. The reforms were partly successful; intermediaries were abolished, but ceiling laws were widely evaded and holdings remain small and fragmented. About two-thirds of Odisha's farmers are marginal, with under one hectare, which limits their ability to invest in soil and water conservation.

Tribal land is a special concern in Odisha. Regulation 2 of 1956 prohibits the transfer of tribal land to non-tribals in scheduled areas, and the Forest Rights Act of 2006 recognises the rights of forest dwellers to land they have cultivated, giving them the security that encourages care of the land. Odisha has issued more forest rights titles than most states.

A land use policy is the set of rules by which a government decides what each kind of land should be used for. India has long discussed a national land use policy but land is a state subject and most decisions are taken by states and local bodies. Its elements should include the protection of prime agricultural land from conversion to non-agricultural use; the zoning of urban growth onto poorer land; the maintenance of forest and tree cover on one-third of the area; the restoration of degraded and mined land as a condition of use; the protection of coastal zones, wetlands and river floodplains; and the mapping of every plot so that decisions rest on facts. Odisha has taken steps in some of these directions: coastal regulation zones, wetland protection for Chilika and Bhitarkanika, mine closure plans, and a digital record of land through the Bhulekh system.

The purpose of all this is the sustainable use of a fixed resource. Land that is owned securely, mapped accurately, zoned sensibly and farmed carefully can feed a growing population and support its industries without being destroyed. Land treated as an unlimited commons will be lost. That is the lesson of this chapter and the reason its subject matters to every citizen of Odisha.

The Odisha Board examination regularly sets questions on this lesson that require the student to read and interpret land use figures, define categories, and argue about conservation. This section shows how to answer them.

Definitions. Be exact. Net sown area is the area on which crops are sown and harvested at least once in a year; gross cropped area adds the area sown more than once; current fallow is land left uncultivated for one year or less; culturable waste is land that could be cultivated but has not been for more than five years; pasture is land used for grazing; land not available for cultivation is barren and waste land plus land under non-agricultural uses. A definition that says only 'land where crops grow' will lose marks.

Calculations. Given net sown area and area sown more than once, add them for gross cropped area, then divide gross by net and multiply by 100 for cropping intensity. Given a table of categories in hectares, convert to percentages by dividing each by the reporting area. Show every step; the examiner gives marks for the method.

Interpretation. When asked why forest is only 22 per cent of India or why Odisha's net sown area is lower than India's, answer with causes: population pressure and clearance for farming in the first case; hilly forested terrain and rain-fed farming in the second. When asked why the net sown area cannot be expanded, point out that almost all suitable land is already cultivated and that the remaining land is forest, hills, desert or built up; the way forward is irrigation and higher cropping intensity.

Comparison. A question may give the land use of two states and ask for the difference and its reason. Compare category by category, then explain by relief, rainfall, irrigation and population.

Conservation. For a question on land degradation, give the meaning, then the causes in a numbered list with one Indian and one Odisha example each, then the measures in a matching list. For an essay on land as a resource, follow the order of this lesson: importance, factors, categories, pattern, change, degradation, conservation, policy.

Map work. Be able to shade on an outline map of India the states with the highest net sown area (Punjab, Haryana), the highest forest cover (Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram), and the main areas of land degradation by mining (Jharkhand, Chhattisgarh, Odisha) and by wind erosion (Rajasthan). On an outline map of Odisha, mark the coastal plain, the Eastern Ghats highlands, the central tableland, and the districts with the highest forest (Kandhamal, Mayurbhanj) and highest cultivation (Bargarh, Jagatsinghpur).

Practise with actual numbers. If a table gives India's net sown area as 139.5 million hectares and area sown more than once as 60.5 million hectares, the gross cropped area is 200 million hectares and the cropping intensity is 143.4 per cent. If Odisha's net sown area is 5.6 million hectares and gross cropped area 8.4 million, the intensity is 150 per cent. Being able to produce such answers quickly and accurately is what this lesson expects.