Meeting about Nitrate Contamination in Soil and Water
The need for conducting studies on nitrate contamination in soil and water is the need of the hour, soil science experts at the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University have asserted.A meeting of the stakeholders – Indian Council of Agricultural Research, TNAU, and the Indian Institute of Soil Science – was held at the university here recently to deliberate on the scheme “Delineation and Mapping of Nitrate Contamination in Soil and Water in Heavily Fertilized and Intensively cultivated Districts of the Country”.According to an official release that was issued here, A.K. Biswas, Principal Investigator, Indian Institute of Soil Science, Bhopal, said that there was an urgent need to study the nitrate contamination in groundwater of select districts due to heavy fertilization and intensive cultivation.S. Natarajan, Director, Centre for Soil and Crop Management Studies, TNAU, said that though there was much hue and cry about the contamination issue, it was the responsibility of the agricultural scientists to discover whether the contamination was due to fertilization or any other factor such as industrial pollution.
He also stressed the need for Integrated Nutrient Management as “it is necessary to feed the growing population with concomitant improvement of soil health”.Biswapati Mandal, another Principal Investigator of the scheme, said that it was also necessary to unravel whether nitrate pollution was caused due to organic farming.C. Paulraj, Professor and Head, Department of Soil Science, P. Murugesa Boopathi, Director, Planning and Monitoring, spoke.
