Centre debates remodelling fertiliser subsidy
After decades of promoting urea to increase soil fertility, the government has begun to acknowledge that it has achieved quite the opposite. The fact is soil fertility in parts of India is declining because of excessive and imbalanced use of fertilizers. And this confession has come from none other than Kanti Lal Bhuria, union minister of state for agriculture. On August 31, Bhuria admitted in the Rajya Sabha that "there were instances of deterioration of soil fertility and nutrient deficiency in some parts of the country, especially the Indo-Gangetic Plain'.
To address this problem, the government is planning to modify the fertilizer subsidy, taking into account soil ecology. At present, it subsidizes a particular fertilizer, irrespective of its nutrient content and combination. The result is farmers end up using mostly urea, which is heavily subsidized.These fertilizers, however, do not supply all the nutrients and their prolonged use leaves the soil deficient in other minerals, causing soil fatigue. So the government is debating a switch to a nutrient-based subsidy from the current product-based subsidy. Under the new regime only the fertilizer's nutrient constituents, such as nitrogen and phosphorus, will be subsidized.
At the second Fertilizer Advisory Forum held in Delhi in August, Ram Vilas Paswan, the union minister for chemicals and fertilizers, claimed there was a consensus across ministries on the new subsidy. A group of ministers headed by Union Agriculture Minister Sharad Pawar is discussing the shift. The move has not come a day too early. "Soil scientists have been demanding a nutrient-based subsidy for a long time. It is only now that the government has woken up to this problem. It should have dealt with it 15 years ago,' says Y P Abrol, former Indian Agricultural Research Institute scientist and founder member of the India Nitrogen Group.
Imbalance and correction Under the present system there is a direct subsidy on urea. This means the government fixes its price, which is very low. Then there is the notified subsidy on other fertilizers, including di-ammonium phosphate (dap) and muriate of potash (mop), under which the government gives an indicative upper-limit price (see box: Subsidy regime).
While this system allowed the government to keep fertilizer prices lower than production costs, this led to their imbalanced use in two ways. One is the overuse of urea against dap and mop. The second is the overuse of primary nutrients