Dr Mandeep Singh Azad, Dr Manmeet
Megastar Amitabh Bachhan will be the face of the “City Compost Campaign” under Swachh Bharat Mission to encourage citizens to use compost produced from municipal solid waste. India currently produces over 1.54 lakh metric tonne of solid waste per day, 50 per cent of which comprises of organic waste that can be converted into compost and gas, 30 per cent is inorganic waste, which can be converted into energy, India has the potential to produce 54 lakh metric tonne of compost per annum from waste. The Ministry added compost, produced organically from waste, is free of harmful chemicals and serves to provide carbon and primary or secondary nutrients to soil and increases its water retention capacity. Composting imitates nature’s way of rebuilding soil by encouraging the decomposition of organic substances. Besides being the cheapest method of disposing organic wastes, composting is eco-friendly, since it prevents production of harmful greenhouse gases (especially methane) and toxic material that pollutes groundwater apart from polluting the environment, but despite its clear advantages, the current production lags far its potential. Hence, a focused communication campaign is being launched to spread awareness and push up the production of city compost leading to increased quantum of waste processing and disposal and lessening the burden on existing dumpsites. Fertilizer companies and marketing entities will also co-market City Compost with chemical fertilizers through their dealers’ network. The companies will also adopt villages for promoting the use of compost. Government Departments and Public Sector undertakings will also use City Compost for their horticulture and related uses. Concerned Ministry/ Department will carry out IEC campaigns to educate farmers on the benefits of city compost and will take steps to increase setting up of compost plants across all States. The Agricultural Extension Machin-eries including KVKs of ICAR will also make special efforts in this regard. Agriculture Universities and KVKs will also take up field demonstration activities using City compost for which department of Agriculture, Cooperation and Farmers Welfare will assign targets to them.
India’s Green Revolution rescued our nation from famines and we now have huge surplus stocks of food-grains, but at a terrible cost. Over 11.6 million hectares of low-productivity nutrient-depleted soils have been ruined by unbalanced and excessive use of synthetic fertilizers and lack of organic manures or micronutrients, at an economic loss of Rs 1 – 3 Billion, annually. Our Planning Commission estimates a shortfall of 6 million tons a year of organic manures. City Compost can fill this need and solve both problems, of man-made barrens and organic nutrient shortages. India’s 35 largest cities alone can provide 5.7 million tons a year of organic manures if their biodegradable waste is composted and returned to the soil. Adopting Integrated Plant Nutrient Management (IPNM) for use of valuable city compost along with synthetic fertilizers will generate enormous national savings for the prosperity of India’s farmers as well as the cleaning of urban India. There is scarcely any other national programme which can bring such huge benefits to both urban and rural sectors, and address the desperate need to save India’s soils and sustain their productivity.
City composts contain all 17 required micro-nutrients, derived from the biodegradable food wastes they are produced from, and can counter the galloping depletion of micro-nutrients in Indian soils since heavy chemical-fertiliser use began to be used for intensive cultivation. We are currently deficient in as many as 8 micro-nutrients. Compost used with synthetic fertilizers makes crops more pest-resistant by strengthening their root-systems, reducing pollution by excessive and needless pesticide use. IPNM also helps control nutrient wastage and pollution of ground-water with nitrate. When compost is also used, its humus acts like a slow-release sponge, retains nitrates for the plants and thus increases the uptake and efficiency of the chemical fertilizers it is used with, increasing all crop productivities compared to synthetic fertilizers alone.
Farmers have used domestic waste on their fields for centuries. They clearly recognize the value of organic manure, of which there is such a shortage that farm produce was brought in and city waste ferried out until 50 years ago. Today, urban waste-transport drivers are bribed to dump reasonably biodegradable raw garbage (esp. market waste) onto farmers’ fields. Uncovered and uncomposted, these rotting waste heaps breed rats and insects which carry diseases, and stray dogs which not only carry rabies and rickettsia but form hunting-packs that kill nearby livestock at night and cause dog-bites and traffic accidents by day.If city wastes are instead composted before applying them to the soil, the cities would be cleaned up and the fields around cities would be spared the infertility induced by today’s accumulating plastic-film waste. Health and hygiene in semi-urban areas would visibly improve.
Unfortunately, farmers have no long-term experience of good city compost, which they expect almost free like raw garbage, so there is an unwillingness to pay for an upgraded product.
Apart from balancing nutrient supplies, organic manures play a vital role in maintaining favourable soil biology and optimum physical environment”. Their tremendously useful soil microbes and humus help to aerate the soil, improve water retention and resistance to both drought and water-logging, and can reduce irrigation requirements and conflicts over water. City compost can also restore saline and alkaline soils to fertility.
The Fertiliser Association of India (FAI), the leading lobby for synthetic fertilizers, is narrowly focused only on protecting its massive subsidies (Rs 142,500 million = US$ 3 billion annually) for chemical fertilizers, given to producers, not farmers, and increasingly being questioned in national debate. Just 12% of this annual subsidy would meet the one-time capital cost of city compost plants in our 400 largest cities over 100,000 population and produce 5.7 million tons a year of organic soil conditioners.Massive subsidy to urea has led to the highly disproportionate use of NPK which has been so damaging to India’s agricultural policy and has yet to be successfully brought to optimum balanced levels.
Finally, composting needs to be seen by all decision-makers as not just one of many options for processing and disposal of city waste, but an absolute imperative for nutrient recycling and soil improvement in a largely agricultural economy. Government should start large scale motivation for collection of city waste and use of it for compost making which if used in crops will indirectly return to the consumers in the form of healthy urea free food crops.
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