Economic Impact of Land Degradation

The twentieth century has been a century of unprecedented economic development and environmental change. Extensive debate has been on the relationship between development and environmental degradation in the past few years. Industrialization has provided for better economies and has sustained human development. However, this industrialization and development has occurred unevenly with increasingly destruction of world’s natural resources. In this context, the question about the impact of industrialization and degraded resources is most relevant for developing country like India. During the last few decades there has been phenomenal increase in industries in India. Besides, India supports its population with only 2.3 percent of the world’s land area. Taking into account the total land resources including hills, mountains, lakes, rivers and lands of all description, the availability of land per head in India comes to only 0.58 hectares and area of cultivation has been considerably reduced by the industrialization.Hence there need to analyze the degradation of land resources and prevent the lands for sustainable use.