Continued investment in microbial science, formulation, quality assurance and farmer education will be critical to scaling biologicals and building long-term trust.
India’s soils are running low on the one thing that cannot be bought in a sack. Government testing under the Soil Health Card scheme found that 64 per cent of samples were low in nitrogen and 48.5 per cent low in organic carbon, the measure that governs whether soil holds water, cycles nutrients and sustains microbial life.The Green Revolution was an achievement of chemistry, and it worked brilliantly, turning a food-deficit nation into a grain-surplus one within a generation. Six decades on, the ledger reads differently. ISRO’s Space Applications Centre places degraded and desertified land at 97.84 million hectares, close to 30 per cent of the country’s geographical area.There is a fiscal dimension too. India has budgeted about ₹1.71 lakh crore for fertiliser subsidies in 2026-27, roughly 3.2 per cent of total central budgeted expenditure. Use remains heavily skewed towards nitrogen, with a national N:P:K consumption ratio of about 9.8:3.7:1, though requirements vary by crop, soil and climate. The challenge is not chasing a single national ratio but improving balanced, soil-test-based, integrated nutrient management.The constraint has quietly changedTreat soil as an inert growing medium, and the answer to falling yields is always to add more. Treat it as a living system, and the diagnosis inverts. Much applied phosphorus becomes chemically fixed and unavailable; applied nitrogen volatilises or leaches into groundwater. Decades of monocropping, residue burning and chemical load have thinned the organisms that unlock bound nutrients, suppress pathogens and build organic matter.That is the real constraint: not how much nutrition reaches the field, but how much a plant can take up. Chemistry answered by adding volume. Biology answers by rebuilding the machinery that makes nutrients available. One approach pushes against the soil; the other repairs it.Why this generation is differentEarlier, inconsistencies stemmed from variation in application method, timing and dosage, so early skepticism was understandable. Three things have changed. Strain science has moved from generic cultures to genomically characterised organisms selected for specific soils, crops and stresses. New formulations and consortium technologies survive Indian storage conditions. And compatibility has improved, so many modern biologicals integrate into established seed-treatment, drip and spray systems. These products are now bought as performance inputs, not ideological ones.Markets are moving ahead of mandatesExport demand is a major driver. Residue limits in Europe and Japan have made maximum residue level compliance a survival question for Indian grape, basmati, spice and processed-food exporters, and consignment rejections are expensive teachers. Growers serving those buyers have rebuilt crop protection around integrated and biological approaches out of arithmetic, not conviction. Policy reinforces the direction. Fourteen states cut chemical fertiliser use by 15.14 lakh metric tonnes in 2023-24 against their three-year average under PM-PRANAM, which returns half the subsidy saved to the state as a grant. The National Mission on Natural Farming targets 15,000 clusters covering 7.5 lakh hectares. Institutional demand is being manufactured, deliberately.What must be fixed before it scalesFast growth brings its own challenges. Continued investment in microbial science, formulation, quality assurance and farmer education will be critical to scaling biologicals and building long-term trust. The framing of chemistry against biology deserves retirement, too. The defensible path is integrated crop nutrition and protection, where biological inputs raise the efficiency of a reduced chemical load rather than replacing it. No farmer is served by ideology from either direction.Feeding close to ten billion people by 2050, on land that is warmer and shrinking, will not come from applying more of what has stopped working. The last agricultural revolution arrived in a sack. The next arrives in a culture flask.The author is President, IPL BiologicalsPublished on August 30, 2026
