BIOSAFOR - BIOSALINE (AGRO) FORESTRY - Central Soil Salinity ...

India Scenario
India has 6.73 million hectare area affected by salinity and sodicity in different states (Fig. 1 and Table 2) and
the salinity affected areas are increasing due to secondary salinization and other factors. A sizeable portion of
these salt affected soils are highly deteriorated making relabilitation of such lands difficult due to lack of
resources, such lands being community lands and being owned by resource poor farmers using costly
chemical amendments. Revegetation of such lands through different land uses viz. plantation of multipurpose
tree species including energy plantation are some of the options to meet the fuel, fodder, timber and
energy needs is promising in view of fuelwood, energy, fodder shortages and environmental benefits. This
approach is known to have the potential to reclaim wastelands and provide livelihood security through
regular employment generation. Due to large population, India can not afford any diversion of agriculture
land to meet its fast rising energy demands which have to be met from such marginal areas only. Therefore,
primary requirements are:
• Use marginal soil & water resources
• Not compete with food production and conventional forestry products
• Improve or balance biodiversity
• Proper GHG accounting and land-use management.
• Not disrupt tropical rainforests etc
This has additional advantage of strengthening local communities without any disruption. Woody biomass
has the highest carbon values, trees perform many other useful environmental services and biomass for
energy has the potential to be a key lever for rural development.
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