NCERT Class 12 Geography Land Resorces and Agriculture

LAND RESOURCES AND AGRICULTURE

You must have observed that the land around you is put to different uses. Some land is occupied by rivers, some may have trees and on some parts roads and buildings have been built. Different types of lands are suited to different uses. Human beings thus, use land as a resource for production as well as residence and recreation. Thus, the building of your school, roads on which you travel, parks in which you play, fields in which crops are grown and the pastures where animals graze represent different uses to which land is put.

Land Use Categories

Land-use records are maintained by land revenue department. The land use categories add up to reporting area, which is somewhat different from the geographical area. The Survey of India is responsible for measuring geographical area of administrative units in India. Have you ever used a map prepared by Survey of India? The difference between the two concepts are that while the former changes somewhat depending on the estimates of the land revenue records, the latter does not change and stays fixed as per Survey of India measurements. You may be familiar with land use categories as they are also included in your Social Science textbook of Class X.

Land-use Changes in India

Land-use in a region, to a large extent, is influenced by the nature of economic activities carried out in that region. However, while economic activities change over time, land, like many other natural resources, is fixed in terms of its area. At this stage, one needs to appreciate three types of changes that an economy undergoes, which affect land-use.

(i) The size of the economy (measured in terms of value for all the goods and services produced in the economy) grows over time as a result of increasing population, change in income levels, available technology and associated factors. As a result, the pressure on land will increase with time and marginal lands would come under use.

(ii) Secondly, the composition of the economy would undergo a change over time. In other words, the secondary and the tertiary sectors usually grow much faster than the primary sector, specifically the agricultural sector. This type of change is common in developing countries like India. This process would result in a gradual shift of land from agricultural uses to non-agricultural uses. You would observe that such changes are sharp around large urban areas. The agricultural land is being used for building purposes.

(iii) Thirdly, though the contribution of the agricultural activities reduces over time, the pressure on land for agricultural activities does not decline. The reasons for continued pressure on agricultural land are:

(a) In developing countries, the share of population dependent on agriculture usually declines much more slowly compared to the decline in the sector’s share in GDP.

(b) The number of people that the agricultural sector has to feed is increasing day by day. Agricultural Land Use in India Land resource is more crucial to the livelihood of the people depending on  agriculture:

(i) Agriculture is a purely land based  activity unlike secondary and tertiary activities. In other words, contribution of land in agricultural output is more compared to its contribution in the outputs in the other sectors. Thus, lack of access to land is directly correlated with incidence of poverty in rural areas.

(ii) Quality of land has a direct bearing on the productivity of agriculture, which is not true for other activities.

(iii) In rural areas, aside from its value as a productive factor, land ownership has a social value and serves as a security for credit, natural hazards or life contingencies, and also adds to the social status.

An estimation of the total stock of agricultural land resources (i.e. total cultivable land can be arrived at by adding up net sown area, all fallow lands and culturable wasteland. It may be observed from Table 5.1 that over the years, there has been a marginal decline in the available total stock of cultivable land as a percentage to total reporting area. There has been a greater decline of cultivated land, in spite of a corresponding decline of cultivable wasteland.

EXERCISES

1. Choose the right answers of the following from the given options.

(i) Which one of the following is NOT a land-use category?

     (a) Fallow land              (c) Net Area Sown

     (b) Marginal land          (d) Culturable Wasteland

(ii) What one of the following is the main reason due to which share of forest has shown an increase in the last forty years?

     (a) Extensive and efficient efforts of afforestation

     (b) Increase in community forest land

     (c) Increase in notified area allocated for forest growth

     (d) Better peoples’ participation in managing forest area.

(iii) Which one of the following is the main form of degradation in irrigated areas?

     (a) Gully erosion                  (c) Salinisation of soils

     (b) Wind erosion                  (d) Siltation of land

(iv) Which one of the following crops is not cultivated under dryland farming?

     (a) Ragi                               (c) Groundnut

     (b) Jowar                              (d) Sugarcane

(v) In which of the following group of countries of the world, HYVs of wheat and rice were developed?

     (a) Japan and Australia          (c) Mexico and Philippines

     (b) U.S.A. and Japan              (d) Mexico and Singapore

2. Answer the following questions in about 30 words.

(i) Differentiate between barren and wasteland and culturable wasteland.

(ii) How would you distinguish between net sown area and gross cropped area?

(iii) Why is the strategy of increasing cropping intensity important in a country like India?

(iv) How do you measure total cultivable land?

(v) What is the difference between dryland and wetland farming?

3. Answer the following questions in about 150 words.

(i) What are the different types of environmental problems of land resources in India?

(ii) What are the important strategies for agricultural development followed in the post-independence period in India?

Please refer to attached file for NCERT Class 12 Geography Land Resorces and Agriculture