Thinking global, living local

← All Articles (Index) India's Carbon Credit Market: Domestic Compliance Meets International Article 6.2 Two threads on this blog — urea-heavy fertiliser policy and the bio-fertiliser/green-credit response to it — both point toward the same unfinished question: what happens once India starts pricing the emissions those sectors are being asked to cut? This is the third piece, on the market itself. The first two articles in this loose trilogy looked at sides of the same problem from ground level. Nature Versus Nurture: India's Fertiliser-Fed Food Security diagnosed how decades of urea-heavy fertiliser policy have been quietly costing India its soil fertility. Bio-Fertiliser and Green Credits: Regrowing India's Arid Land covered the policy response taking shape around that diagnosis — GOBARdhan bio-fertiliser plants, the Green Credit Programme's tree-plantation mechanism, and, in a short closing section, a first look at whether Compressed Bio-Gas (CBG) projects co...

← All Articles (Index) Bio-Fertiliser and Green Credits: Regrowing India's Arid Land 119 biogas plants, a ₹1,500/MT subsidy and a tree-plantation registry — the candidate "better nurture" for soil that urea has been quietly drawing down. The previous piece on this blog, "Nature Versus Nurture: India's Fertiliser-Fed Food Security" , made an uncomfortable case: the "nature" story of Indian crop yields is propped up by an imported, gas-priced, and — per its second half — soil-degrading "nurture." Decades of urea-heavy fertilisation have been drawing down soil organic matter even as they kept yields up. That argument ended on a diagnosis, not a cure. It left open the obvious next question: if urea-heavy nurture has been costing the soil, what does a better nurture look like, and where does it actually stand today — not in policy-speak, but in plants, subsidies, and hectares? This piece tries to answer that, honestly, using two real...

← All Articles (Index) Nature Versus Nurture: India's Fertiliser-Fed Food Security India's record grain targets are the "nature" story — sown area, monsoon, yield. The fertiliser supply chain that actually delivers them is the "nurture" — engineered, imported, gas-priced, and increasingly exposed to events thousands of kilometres from any Indian field. Thinking global, living local — an independent strategic briefing, June 2026 Nature Versus Nurture, Applied to a Harvest The nature-versus-nurture question is usually asked about people: how much of who we are is innate, and how much is shaped by what is done to us? India's foodgrain economy poses the same question every season, and the answer is more lopsided than the record-breaking headlines suggest. The "nature" side is real. The Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare has set a foodgrain production target of 362.5 million tonnes (MT) for FY 2025–26, building on a record FY 2...