Resources and Development: Class 10 Geography · Chapter 1

Switch on a fan, ride a bus to school, eat a plate of dal and rice: each uses something that began in nature and was changed by people. This chapter asks what turns a thing in nature into a resource and how India plans and protects its resources. It then looks closely at two of them, land and soil, which shape so much of how we live.

1.1 Resources and their types

Crude oil lay under the hills of upper Assam for millions of years before it was of any use to anyone. It became useful only when people learnt to drill for it, refine it and sell it at a price buyers could pay.11Digboi in Assam has refined oil since 1901, making it India's oldest working refinery. Until then it was simply part of the rocks.

So a thing in our surroundings counts as a resource (संसाधन) only when it passes three tests. We need the technology to reach and use it, using it must pay for itself, and society must accept its use. In exam language a resource must be technologically accessible, economically feasible and culturally acceptable. Fail any one test and the thing stays just ‘stuff’.

Turning stuff into resources is teamwork between nature, technology and institutions: banks, laws, markets, government departments and panchayats. People sit at the centre of this team. We invent the technology, build the institutions and do the work (Fig. 1.1). That is why resources are not simply free gifts of nature. Human beings are themselves a resource, and their numbers and skills decide how much every other resource yields.

Four ways to classify resources

The same resource can be sorted in four ways, depending on the question we ask about it (Fig. 1.2).

• By origin: is it living? Biotic resources come from the living world: forests, crops, fish, livestock and people. Abiotic resources are non-living: rocks, metals, water and sunlight.
• By exhaustibility: can it be renewed? Renewable resources are replaced by natural processes: sunlight, wind, flowing water, and also forests and wildlife if we do not overuse them. Non-renewable resources took millions of years to form, so a used-up stock is lost to us: coal, petroleum, natural gas and metal ores.
• By ownership: who owns it? Individual resources belong to a person, like a farmer's field or a private well. Community resources are shared by everyone in a village or town: a pond, a grazing ground, a park, a cremation ground. National resources belong to the country, such as its forests, rivers, minerals and the sea along its coast. International resources lie beyond any one country, like the deep ocean floor far from all coasts, and their use is governed by international bodies.
• By status of development: how far have we got with it? Potential resources are known to exist in a region but are not yet used, like the strong tides of the Gulf of Khambhat. Developed resources have been surveyed, measured for quality and quantity, and are in use, like coal mined in the Jharia field. Stock is material that could meet our needs but which we lack the technology to use, like energy from nuclear fusion. Reserves are the part of the stock we can already use but keep aside for later, like water held behind a dam for the summer months.

Your textbook's classification tree also separates natural resources from human ones. Human resources are judged by quantity (how many people) and quality (their health, education and skills). People also create structures and institutions, such as schools, hospitals, banks and cooperatives, that help every other resource to be used.

1.2 Development of resources

A hundred years ago few people worried that coal, forests or groundwater might run short: nature seemed to hand them out free and without limit. That belief led to careless use, and careless use has caused three big problems:

• Running out: stocks shrink when a few users take far more than they need.
• Unequal sharing: when resources pile up in a few hands, society splits into the haves and the have-nots, the rich and the poor.
• Ecological crises: reckless use has brought global warming, a thinner ozone layer, polluted air and water, and degraded land.

Two lessons follow. First, resources must be shared fairly. A world in which a few people and countries use up most of them can be neither decent nor peaceful, and its future is at risk. Second, their use must be planned so that every form of life, now and later, can survive. Planning for survival in this way is part of sustainable development (सतत् पोषणीय विकास). Fig. 1.4 shows the idea with groundwater.

1.3 Resource planning

Resource planning (संसाधन नियोजन) means deciding in advance how to use resources wisely, and India shows why it matters. Travel from the coal belt of Jharkhand to the deserts of Rajasthan and the rain-soaked hills of Arunachal Pradesh, and the resources change completely (Table 1.3). A region may be rich in one resource and poor in another; only a few have nearly everything they need, and some lack something vital.

No single plan can fit all these regions. That is why India plans its resources at every level: for the nation, each state, each region and each locality.

1.3.1 Resource planning in India

Resource planning is not one decision but a chain of three tasks (Fig. 1.5):

1. Identify and list the resources of every region: survey them, map them, and estimate how much there is and how good it is.
2. Build a planning set-up with the right technology, trained people and institutions to carry out development plans.
3. Fit each resource plan into the country's overall development plan.

India has pursued these goals since the First Five Year Plan (1951–56), launched soon after Independence. In 2015 the Planning Commission was replaced by the NITI Aayog, which now advises on such planning.

A treasure chest is of little use without the key. A region needs resources to develop, but it also needs the technology to use them and institutions to organise their use; without these, rich deposits can lie beside poor villages. That is how India comes to have resource-rich regions that are economically backward, and resource-poor regions that are prosperous.

History teaches the same lesson. In the nineteenth century, Britain's machines and steamships let it buy raw cotton cheaply in India, spin and weave it in Lancashire mills and sell the cloth back to Indians. Colonies were coveted for their resources, and superior technology let the colonisers exploit them and rule; India lived through this in several phases. The lesson for India: what its resources do for its people depends on more than what lies in the ground. It also depends on the technology at hand, the skills of its workers and the experience of its history.

1.3.2 Conservation of resources

Development cannot happen without resources. But a tube well that runs day and night, or a forest cut faster than it regrows, harms people, economies and the environment alike. The answer is conservation, practised by households, villages, countries and the world together. Long before it became a global slogan, thinkers in India and abroad argued for it.

Gandhiji saw greed, not need, as what drains the Earth, and he distrusted technology used to exploit people and nature. Instead of huge factories turning out goods by the million (mass production), he wanted production by the masses: work spread among many people, like the charkha spinning in every home.

1.4 Land resources

Everything you did today, from sleeping at home to eating rice and riding a bus to school, used land. Forests, wildlife, crops, factories, roads and phone towers all stand on it. Unlike almost any other resource, its amount is fixed: India cannot make more land, only plan how to use what it has.

Look at India's relief and you find four kinds of land: mountains, plateaus, plains and islands. Plains cover about 43 per cent of the land area, mountains 30 per cent and plateaus 27 per cent (Fig. 1.6). Each does a different job for us.

1.4.1 Land utilisation

Government land records sort India's land into five groups by how it is used. These categories are the language of every land-use table, so learn them well:

1. Forests.
2. Land not available for cultivation:
   • barren and waste land, such as rocky or desert land
   • land put to non-agricultural uses: houses, roads, railways, factories
3. Other uncultivated land (excluding fallow):
   • permanent pastures and grazing land
   • land under miscellaneous tree crops and groves, not counted in the net sown area
   • culturable waste land: could be farmed but has lain unfarmed for more than 5 agricultural years
4. Fallow land:
   • current fallow: left unsown for one agricultural year or less
   • fallow other than current fallow: unsown for between 1 and 5 agricultural years
5. Net sown area: the land on which crops are actually sown and harvested.

1.4.2 Land use pattern in India

How land gets used depends on two sets of factors:

India's total geographical area is about 3.28 million sq km, but land-use records cover only about 93 per cent of it. Reporting is incomplete for most north-eastern states other than Assam, and the areas of Jammu and Kashmir that Pakistan and China occupy have never been surveyed. Shares in land-use tables are therefore per cent of the reporting area.

Fig. 1.7 compares the shares of each category in 1960–61 and 2019–20. Two things stand out. The net sown area has stayed close to 45 per cent for sixty years. Forests have grown, but only from about 18 to about 23 per cent of the reporting area.

The net sown area differs hugely between states. Punjab and Haryana sow more than four-fifths of their area (over 80 per cent). Arunachal Pradesh, Mizoram, Manipur and the Andaman and Nicobar Islands sow less than a tenth (under 10 per cent).

Why does some land stay fallow for years? Usually it is poor, or too costly to farm every season, so farmers sow it only once or twice every two or three years. Add such land to the net sown area and the share of the reporting area under the plough rises to about 54 per cent.

The National Forest Policy of 1952 set a goal of keeping one-third (33 per cent) of the country under forest to keep nature in balance. India is still well short of that goal. The gap matters to people as well as wildlife: millions of tribal and village families along forest edges live by collecting fuelwood, fodder, tendu leaves, honey and medicinal plants.

Two more categories need watching. Rocky, dry and desert tracts make up the waste land. Homes, roads, railway lines and factories occupy land put to non-agricultural uses, a share that grows every year as towns spread. And land worked year after year with no care to protect it slowly wears out, which harms both people and the environment.

1.5 Land degradation and conservation measures

Think of land as a family heirloom: we received it from earlier generations and owe it, in good shape, to later ones. It feeds, clothes and houses us; about 95 per cent of these basic needs come from land. Land degradation (भूमि निम्नीकरण) is the loss of land's ability to produce. People cause it directly, and they also make wind and water wear land away faster than they would on their own.

The main human causes are cutting forests, overgrazing, mining and quarrying, over-irrigation, dust from mineral processing and industrial waste. Different regions suffer from different causes (Table 1.6).

When a mine is worked out, it is often simply left. What remains is a scarred landscape of open pits and heaps of overburden, the waste rock and soil removed to reach the ore, where a forest once grew.

Over-irrigation works more slowly (Fig. 1.8). When fields are flooded with canal water year after year, the water table rises and the soil stays soaked, or waterlogged. Water drawn up to the surface evaporates and leaves its dissolved salts behind, so the soil turns saline and alkaline.

Works that crush limestone for cement, or calcite and soapstone for tiles and ceramics, fill the air with fine dust. It settles on nearby fields as a crust, so rain runs off instead of soaking in. Factory effluents dumped without treatment have also become a major polluter of land and water across India.

Degraded land can be healed, and the remedy depends on the cause:

1.6 Soil as a resource

Of all our natural resources, soil may matter most. Plants grow in it, and it is home to countless living things. It is itself a living system, full of roots, earthworms, fungi and bacteria. And it forms very slowly: the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that one centimetre of topsoil can take up to 1,000 years to form. Your textbook stresses the same point, saying a few centimetres take ‘millions of years’.

Think of soil as a very slow recipe. The base ingredient is the parent rock (bedrock); the cooks are climate, the relief (slope) of the land, plants and other living things, and time. Daily heating and cooling cracks the rock; rain, rivers, wind and glaciers grind and carry the pieces; and decomposers turn dead leaves and animals into humus. Chemical reactions and the work of living things go on all the while. The finished soil is part inorganic (rock particles) and part organic (humus).

Dig a deep pit and you see the layers, called horizons, which together make the soil profile (Fig. 1.9). At the top is dark, humus-rich topsoil. Below it lies subsoil of weathered rock with sand, silt and clay, then a substratum of loose, weathered parent rock. At the bottom is solid, unweathered bedrock.

1.6.1 Classification of soils

Because India has such varied relief, landforms, climates and plant cover, it has many kinds of soil. Geographers sort them by how they formed and by colour, depth, texture, age and chemical and physical make-up. Table 1.7 sums up the six main types.

Alluvial soils

Alluvial soil (जलोढ़ मृदा) is India's most widespread and most important soil. It was laid down by three great Himalayan river systems, the Indus, the Ganga and the Brahmaputra, so it forms the whole of the northern plains. It also reaches Rajasthan and Gujarat through a narrow corridor, and covers the eastern coastal plains, especially the deltas of the Mahanadi, Godavari, Krishna and Kaveri.

Alluvium is a mix of sand, silt and clay in different proportions. Particle size depends on where the river dropped its load. Near the foot of the mountains, where rivers rush out at the break of slope, the soil is coarse. This is typical of piedmont plains such as the Duars, Chos and Terai. Rivers slow down further downstream and drop ever finer particles.

Alluvium is also grouped by age (Fig. 1.10). Bangar is old alluvium on higher ground; it has more kankar (lime) nodules. Khadar is new alluvium on the low floodplain, refreshed by floods almost every year. Its particles are finer, and it is the more fertile of the two.

Taken together, alluvial soils are highly fertile. They usually contain enough potash, phosphoric acid and lime, which suits sugarcane, paddy, wheat and other cereals and pulses. That is why alluvial regions are intensively farmed and densely populated. Soils in drier areas are more alkaline, but they can be made productive with proper treatment and irrigation.

Black soil

Black soil (काली मृदा), also called regur, is famous for cotton, hence its other name, black cotton soil. It developed on the lava rock (basalt) of the Deccan trap in the north-west of the Deccan plateau; climate and this parent rock together produced it. You find it on the Maharashtra plateau, in Saurashtra (Gujarat), on the Malwa plateau and elsewhere in Madhya Pradesh, and in Chhattisgarh. From there it stretches south-east along the Godavari and Krishna valleys.

Black soil is made of very fine, clayey particles, so it holds moisture well. It is rich in lime and calcium carbonate, magnesium and potash, but usually short of phosphorus. In the hot, dry season it shrinks and opens deep cracks, which let air into the soil (Fig. 1.11). When wet, it swells and turns sticky and heavy, so farmers try to plough it just after the first shower or before the monsoon arrives.

Red and yellow soils

Red soil develops on old crystalline igneous rocks in the drier, low-rainfall east and south of the Deccan plateau. Red and yellow soils also occur in parts of Odisha and Chhattisgarh, the southern part of the middle Ganga plain and the foothill (piedmont) zone of the Western Ghats. The red colour comes from iron spread through crystalline and metamorphic rocks. Where the iron is hydrated, that is, combined with water, the soil looks yellow.

Laterite soil

The name comes from the Latin later, meaning brick; dug out and dried, laterite hardens like brick. Laterite soil forms in tropical and subtropical climates with alternate wet and dry seasons. Heavy rain soaks through it and washes nutrients down and out, a process called intense leaching (निक्षालन).

The result is usually deep to very deep soil that is acidic (pH below 6.0) and poor in plant nutrients. Under deciduous and evergreen forests it is rich in humus; under thin vegetation in semi-arid areas it has little. Because of where it lies on the landscape, it is easily eroded and degraded.

• Where: the southern states, Maharashtra's Western Ghats, Odisha, some of West Bengal, and the north-east.
• Tea and coffee: with soil conservation, it grows these on the hill slopes of Karnataka, Kerala and Tamil Nadu.
• Cashew nut: grows well on the red laterite of Kerala, Tamil Nadu and Andhra Pradesh.

Arid soils

Arid soils are reddish to brown in colour, sandy in texture and salty; in some places they are so salty that people make common salt by evaporating the water drawn from them. Heat and dryness speed up evaporation, so these soils lack humus and moisture. Calcium increases with depth, so the lower horizons hold a layer of kankar that stops water seeping down. With proper irrigation, arid soils can be farmed, as western Rajasthan shows.22The Indira Gandhi Canal, which begins at the Harike barrage in Punjab, carries water deep into the Thar desert.

Forest soils

Forest soils form in hilly and mountain areas that get enough rain to support forests. Their texture changes with the mountain setting: loamy and silty on valley sides, coarse-grained on upper slopes. In the snow-covered parts of the Himalayas they are worn away (denuded), acidic and low in humus. Lower down the valleys, especially on river terraces and alluvial fans, they are fertile.

1.7 Soil erosion and soil conservation

Picture soil as a bank account: new soil is the deposit, lost soil the withdrawal. Nature makes both entries all the time, and normally they roughly balance. Soil erosion (मृदा अपरदन) is the withdrawal side: the soil cover is stripped and washed or blown away. When people clear forests, overgraze, build or mine, withdrawals race ahead, and water, wind and glaciers carry off the exposed soil.

Erosion takes several forms (Fig. 1.12):

• Gully erosion: rainwater rushing over clayey soil carves ever deeper channels called gullies, until the land is too cut up to plough. Such land is called bad land; the ravines of the Chambal basin, across Madhya Pradesh, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, are a well-known example.
• Sheet erosion: after heavy rain, water slides down a slope as one thin, wide film and quietly removes the topsoil from the whole field.
• Wind erosion: strong, dry winds lift loose topsoil from bare fields and carry it away as dust.
• Faulty farming: furrows ploughed straight down a slope act like drains, rushing water and soil downhill.

Farmers can slow or stop erosion with methods suited to their land (Fig. 1.13):

• Contour ploughing (समोच्च जुताई): ploughing along the contour lines, across the slope, so each furrow holds water back.
• Terrace farming: cutting a slope into flat steps. Hill farmers in the western and central Himalayas have farmed on terraces for generations.
• Strip cropping: a wide field is farmed in bands, crop and grass in turn, so the grass bands slow the wind before it can lift the soil.
• Shelter belts: rows of trees that act as windbreaks. In western India they have helped pin down moving sand dunes and keep the desert from spreading.