SPATIAL DISTRIBUTION OF DIFFERENT TYPES OF DEGRADED AND WASTELANDS IN INDIA: A CASE STUDY OF BIHAR

India is land of farmers. More than 70 per cent of India’s population is living in rural areas with agriculture as their livelihood support system. Sustainable agricultural development and food security will be one of the key challenges for India in this century because the task of providing food security to our country’s burgeoning population is becoming increasingly difficult. This challenge must and needs to be met in the face of the changing consumption pattern, impacts of climate change and the degradation of the finite land and water resources. The vast majority of Indian farmers are small and marginal. Their farm size is decreasing further and per capita availability of inelastic land resource is rapidly declining in relation to annual population growth of 1.58 per cent in the country. The quality of land is deteriorating due to heightened nutrient mining, soil erosion, increasing water scarcity, adverse impact of climate change and accumulation of toxic elements in soil and water. Increasing GDP growth is expanding urbanization and industrialization and, therefore, more and more agricultural lands are being utilized for non-agricultural purposes. The complex interplay of natural and anthropogenic processes compounds problems of land use planning further. All of these factors combined with increased rate of land degradation are contributing towards decline in agricultural productivity leading to food insecurity. State level and country level information has already been published by the National Remote Sensing Agency (now NRSC). The first order need of the day, therefore, is to prepare a national degraded and wastelands map downscaled to districts. In the present paper an attempt has been made to discuss the nature and causes of the land degradation, its spatial distribution and the determination of degree and extent of damaged lands in general at national level and in particular at the state level i.e. Bihar. So that developmental agencies in participation with stakeholders proactively adopt measures to reclaim degraded lands for distancing food insecurity, a real challenge