Land Use and Land Resources

India's total geographical area is about 3.28 million sq km, but land-use statistics are reported for about 93 percent of it (the rest is not surveyed, mostly the areas under PoK, Aksai Chin and some hill states). The data come from the Land Use Statistics published by the Ministry of Agriculture.

Nine-fold classification

1. Forests
2. Land put to non-agricultural uses (buildings, roads, industry)
3. Barren and unculturable waste land
4. Permanent pastures and grazing land
5. Land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves
6. Culturable waste land (left uncultivated for more than five years)
7. Fallow land other than current fallow
8. Current fallow (left for one year or less)
9. Net sown area

Important terms

• Net sown area: area sown with crops once in a year, about 140 million hectares (about 46 percent of reporting area).
• Gross cropped area: net sown area plus area sown more than once.
• Cropping intensity = gross cropped area / net sown area x 100; about 155 percent in recent years.
• Net irrigated area: see Irrigation.

State patterns

• Highest net sown area share: Punjab and Haryana (above 80 percent of reporting area).
• Lowest: Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Nagaland (forest-dominated), Jammu and Kashmir (mountain terrain).
• Forest-dominated states: Arunachal, Mizoram, Meghalaya, Manipur.

Land degradation

• About a quarter to a third of India's land is degraded in some way (ISRO's Desertification and Land Degradation Atlas gives about 97 million hectares, around 29-30 percent, as degraded). Check the latest edition of the Atlas.
• Causes: water erosion, vegetation loss, wind erosion, salinity.
• India is a signatory to the UNCCD; New Delhi hosted COP14 in 2019 and committed to restore 26 million hectares by 2030.