Disadvantages of urea.

Urea travels from life to poison

A recent study evaluates nitrogen status in India for the first time, suggesting that excessive use of urea has severely affected the nitrogen cycle.

Are urea days gone? This question is because the urea, which increased the yield by many times, bothered the farmers, they are now crying tears of blood. Now the yield is decreasing and the complaints of desertification of the land are also increasing, so farmers have started to quit urea. A recent study evaluates nitrogen status in India for the first time, suggesting that excessive use of urea has severely affected the nitrogen cycle. It is also harming the environment and health. Akshit Sangomla and Anil Ashwini Sharma investigated all aspects of urea

“This time we added urea four times to our one-acre field. Suppose you put more than 200 kg of urea in the fields, but the yield was less than last year. Now this urea has become a mess of our life. If you put it in the fields then there is trouble and there is no question of not putting it. " At present, there is no cure for this confusion of 82-year-old farmer Nandan Poddar of Bukhari village in Begusarai district of Bihar. Urea has become the life of their fields whose crop is being cut as poison.

Urea was used throughout the country after the Green Revolution (1965–66) with the aim of making the country strong in agriculture. Says Poddar, "In the early years, farmers were not duly informed about this urea in many areas of the country. Rather, the sack of urea was put quietly in the fields at night, even when this did not happen, the village sarpanch was urged to use the urea farmers in their respective fields. ” During 1966-67, the government continuously urged all farmers to use urea. He said that we felt that the loss due to farming would turn into profit through the use of urea. It happened exactly the same. We were happy with the increase in yields. Although initially, we were afraid that our crop might get destroyed due to the use of urea. For the first time in 1967, we put only four kg of urea on one acre. When the crop was ready, we could not believe our eyes. Because for the first time we were seeing that the yield of wheat was three times higher.

Poddar told that earlier we used to put four quintals (400 kg) in the same field by putting cow dung manure. Now we were seeing that the yield of wheat directly exceeded 1200 kg. Not all of us are sure what miracle it is. Seeing the increased yields in my fields, the other farmers of the village also added urea to cooperative farms in their fields in the next year ie 1968 and they too were stunned to see their respective crops. After all, who will be a farmer after getting three times more crop, who will not be happy. Urea had become the hero of the fields upon seeing it.

The government also did not leave any stone unturned in the promotion of urea. This propaganda started from the top started to hit the bottom and the farmers started praising it like the film heroes of Pepsi and Cola do. This was also the reason. Indian farmers have seen very few times of distress. The sky and the ground used to swing in expectation. What does a farmer want? The produce of his fields fed his family. And when it started getting more than three times the normal yield of the fields, it seemed as if Goddess Annapurna was pleased.

Nitrogen is essential for plants because it makes nutritious substances restrictive. Plants prepare food through chlorophyll and protein synthesis. Naturally, these essential nutrients are present in the soil through the diazotroph bacteria. They are present in the roots of plants like lentils. But this natural presence after the Industrial Revolution was not enough as it was unable to provide food to the growing population. For this reason, artificial fertilizer was invented to supplement the naturally present nitrogen.

Poddar says that was a strange time. Poured urea was going to the fields, but the intoxication of the produce was climbing us. And we kept on increasing this intoxication. We doubled the amount of urea in our fields the following year (1969) as we now began to realize that the more urea we put in, the better the yield. This time instead of four, we put the entire ten kg of urea in an acre field. As per the expectation, the yield of 2000 kg wheat was increased from three to five times ie 1200. Farmers in the country around three to five times urea in their fields around 1975 became a common thing. It is also true that their production was also increasing at the same rate. But there was no far-reaching program of giving any authorized information from the government to the farmers in this regard. The result was that the farmer was continuously increasing the use of urea in his fields.

He told that we could not even think in the dream that the urea that we have understood to be gold is slowly wasting our fields. Between 1985 and 1995, adding 125 kg of urea per acre increased the yield ten to 12 times. From here we started coming down. Yields in agriculture started to decrease while we increased the quantity of urea year after year. In 1997 we added 175 kg of urea and found what? Same ten times. That is, by increasing urea, the yield of fields was not increasing but was decreasing.

According to Devanandan Chaudhary, 80, of Salauna village in Begusarai, Bihar, the use of urea makes the well and pond water no longer drinkable (Ashutosh)

 Yields have been steadily decreasing since 1995. The indiscriminate use of urea for forty years has left the fields barren. After all, once again, farmers started applying manure of cow dung etc. in their fields. This did not increase the yield, but it also decreased. But by 2010, cow dung manure was also not easily available. Today's situation is that farmers are not getting any hay by putting 225 to 250 kg of urea in one-acre field. Because in any case, it is necessary to produce 12 times of 15-20 years ago. Now all the efforts are failing. Recalling the old times, Poddar says that 50 years ago, the Prime Minister of our country was urging us to use urea. Today, after five decades, when our fields are going to be completely destroyed, the present Prime Minister (in Mann Ki Baat, aired on December 26, 2017) is now appealing for the least use of urea. Not only this, now the government is also reducing the subsidy on urea. 72,438 crore subsidy for urea was placed in the 2015-16 budget, which was reduced to Rs 70,000 crore during 2016-17. Poddar made an estimate that in the last 50 years, we used about 6,610 kg of urea in an acre field and got about 5,337 quintals (wheat and rice).