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This story is from September 1, 2019

India to announce massive land restoration drive stretching from Porbandar to Delhi during upcoming UN meet

India to announce massive land restoration drive stretching from Porbandar to Delhi during upcoming UN meet
NEW DELHI: Scaling up its efforts to restore minimum 30 million hectares of degraded land, India will during the upcoming UN conference announce a massive land restoration initiative which includes creating a huge ‘green path’ running from Mahatma Gandhi’s birthplace at Porbandar in Gujarat to New Delhi.
The announcement will be made in commemoration of 150 years of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday and will coincide with India’s taking over the leadership of the UN Conference of Parties (COP) on combating desertification.

The target for finishing the task of restoring degraded land is likely to be fixed as 2030 - the year when India intends to reach its ‘land degradation neutrality’ through afforestation, prevention of soil erosion, water resource management and sustainable farm practices.
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Prime Minister Narendra Modi is expected to share details of this initiative, including how it will benefit India, and its value to the international community, during the high-level segment of the upcoming COP14 of the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). India is hosting the conference at Greater Noida, near Delhi, between September 2 and 13.
“We have identified a tract of land. Finer details are being worked out,” said Union environment secretary C K Mishra when asked by TOI about the initiative where the ‘green path’ will be created through land restoration processes.

The non-contiguous patch of 30 million hectares in different states - little less than 1/3rd of India’s total degraded land - comprises of degraded forest and agricultural land. Currently, India has 96.4 million hectares of degraded land which is 29.3% of the country’s total geographical area (328.7 million hectares).
Desertification and land degradation atlas of India, brought out by the ISRO in 2016, revealed that Jharkhand, Rajasthan, Delhi, Gujarat and Goa are among the states/UT where more than 50% of their area could be impacted by desertification and land degradation.
Land degradation is basically deterioration in quality of topsoil due to excessive or inappropriate exploitation. On the other hand, desertification is land degradation in arid, semi-arid and dry sub-humid areas resulting from various factors, including climatic variations and human activities leading to loss of productive ecosystem and biodiversity.
Stressing the need to stop and reverse the process of land degradation, ISRO in its atlas said that “sustainable management of soil, water and biodiversity” were required for protecting the land from further degradation.
Sensing the urgency, India had in 2015 committed restoration of 13 million hectares of degraded and deforested land by 2020 and additional 8 million hectares by 2030. The target to make 5 million hectares of degraded land fertile in 10 years, announced by the Union environment minister Prakash Javadekar on last Tuesday, will be part of the overall commitment.
“It is expected that all the targets will converge to make India land degradation neutral by 2030. We are, however, still waiting for details which are being finalised by different ministries,” said an official.
India’s previous commitment had come as part of the ‘Bonn Challenge’ pledge in 2015. The ‘Bonn Challenge’ is a global effort, launched by Germany and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), to bring 150 million hectares of the world’s deforested and degraded land into restoration by 2020, and 350 million hectares by 2030.
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About the Author
Vishwa Mohan

Vishwa Mohan is Senior Editor at The Times of India. He writes on environment, climate change, agriculture, water resources and clean energy, tracking policy issues and climate diplomacy. He has been covering Parliament since 2003 to see how politics shaped up domestic policy and India’s position at global platform. Before switching over to explore sustainable development issues, Vishwa had covered internal security and investigative agencies for more than a decade.

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