This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: A new study from the Indian Institute of Technology Gandhinagar (IITGN) and the Helmholtz Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) has shown that redesigning India's cereal cultivation patterns around nitrogen management could significantly reduce environmental damage while maintaining calorie production and improving agricultural sustainability. The work tackles the long-standing concept in sustainable agriculture of measuring cropping success mainly by the water saved.
Contrary to that, the central insight of the article, published in Nature Communications, is that nitrogen surplus should be at the center of that conversation instead. Nitrogen surplus is the portion of applied fertilizer that crops do not absorb. Unused nitrogen from fertilizers leaches into wells, washes into rivers and evaporates into greenhouse gases such as nitrous oxide, polluting the atmosphere.
It is also cheap to produce, which is part of why it is overapplied, and it lingers in the soil and wider biological cycle far longer than water does. That persistence and reach are strong reasons to shift the planning focus from water toward nitrogen, making the latter a strong policy target. The collaborative work, conducted by Dr.
Shekhar Sharan Goyal and Professor Udit Bhatia from IITGN and Dr. Rohini Kumar of UFZ in Leipzig, optimized the model to minimize nitrogen surplus. The authors noted that water use fell by 18.6% as a side effect, with savings of 86.8 billion cubic meters (22.9 trillion gallons) a year emerging as a near-automatic co-benefit.
The reverse is not as effective. The water gain from a nitrogen-led approach is roughly 4.6 times larger than the nitrogen gain from chasing water. Translating the avoided damage into dollars, the nitrogen-led path averted about $1.19 billion (about ₹10,000 crore) annually.
"Indian agriculture pulls two emergency levers at the same time, too much fertilizer and too much groundwater. We have been trying to fix them one at a time," said Bhatia, corresponding author and an associate professor at IITGN's Department of Civil Engineering. "What this analysis shows is that there is a single lever, nitrogen surplus, that meaningfully moves both.
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