Kamal Ghorui
India’s food and nutrition security hinges on a radical rethink of regenerative agriculture. While foodgrain production has soared, soil degradation threatens long-term sustainability of this achievement, demanding large-scale transitions to be driven by smart financing.
The high hidden cost of Indian agriculture India’s foodgrain output has exploded from around 50 million tonnes in the 1950s-60s to a
record 357 million tonnes in 2024-25, roughly a 7-fold increase over more than 60 years, transforming the nation from net food importer to net exporter. But this feat has come at a steep price: highly degraded soil health caused by rampant use of chemical fertiliser use.
Over 75-80% of soil samples show severe nitrogen deficiency (only 4.6% sufficient), while organic carbon sufficiency hovers at a mere 20.4%, down from historical levels of 1% to 0.3% in recent decades.
Low soil organic carbon (SoC) locks away even added nutrients, slashing fertiliser efficiency—the grain-to-fertiliser ratio in irrigated areas plummeted from 1:10 in the 1970s to 1:2.7 by 2015. This crisis manifests in inflated subsidies, now exceeding INR 49,000 crore for P&K fertilizers in 2025-26 alone, alongside total outlays nearing INR 1.9 lakh crore yearly.
Unfolding regenerative agriculture transition
Without restoring soil vitality, productivity stalls, biodiversity erodes, and water quality suffers, altogether jeopardising long-term food security. Regenerative agriculture—while many terminologies exist, we will go with this for ease of argument in favour of restoring soil health -is a solution that is being adopted but rather slowly. Despite the high rate of adoption in various regions, unfortunately it is not getting translated to realistic meaningful impacts.
To understand this better, we need to observe the three stages of regenerative agriculture. First, at plot level: Farmers test practices on individual land mainly for self-consumption. At this stage,
the additional labour and bio-input requirements are manageable by the farmer. Success is measured by the number of adoptions or farmer enrolment numbers.
Second, pilot stage: Groups of farmers establish a slightly bigger production farmland focussed on a crop-specific sustainable commodity value chains. They manage bio-inputs via bio-resource
centres and manage extra labour with some difficulty. Here, the success metrics expand to acreage, livelihoods, premium prices, and market links.
Third is the landscape level: Majority of contiguous farmlands in blocks or districts with mosaic cropping pattern shift to regenerative methods, unlocking measurable and significant gains in natural capital (mainly soil and water), human capital (health and nutrition), and produced capital (farm incomes). Unfortunately, such model landscapes are not available in India, which hinders large-scale transition.
Barriers to Scale
Why no landscape triumphs? Large shifts demand upfront financial support for small and marginal farmers to recruit additional labour and use the bio-inputs required in large quantities to minimize yield loss during the transition. The present system of output-based incentive under National Mission on Natural Farming offers just INR 4,000 per acre annually for two years (capped at 1 acre per farmer), encouraging only plot adoptions, not contiguous conversions to establish large landscapes of regenerative agriculture. Without bridging this “transition finance” or viability gap, farmers balk at added costs.
Path Forward: Bankable Landscapes
The shift to regenerative agriculture should be seen as a crucial step to strengthening the agri economy of the country, one that has costs that lead to incremental benefits.
Tools like the TEEBAgriFood framework can quantify the multiple benefits of regenerative agriculture: savings on chemical input subsidies, benefits of SoC-driven carbon sequestration (to be materialised through climate finance), biodiversity improvement, cleaner water, and enhanced nutrition levels among farming communities—all convertible to economic value. Cost-benefit analyses can be carried out through such true cost evaluation techniques.
This will prove the bankability of landscape-level transition to regenerative agriculture, with the need for viability gap funding,
attracting large financing institutions like NABARD or the World Bank to invest in the transition process itself.
This financing will need to be backed by developing the mechanisms for incentivising bio-inputs and ensuring labour availability. Increased regenerative agriculture labour means an increase in rural green jobs, supported by large-scale skilling programmes, which are a key challenge at present.
Innovative ways of promoting rural entrepreneurship will need to be designed which blend the precision agriculture principles with regenerative agriculture practices to increase the labour input efficiency.
India needs to move past the stage of merely spurring plot and pilot level shifts; only vast regenerative landscapes can deliver resilient food systems with its co-benefits. This can be achieved by mobilising finance for closing the viability gap for secured harvests, healthier soils, thriving rural economies, and climate resilience. The time for reimagination is now—before soil exhaustion dooms the Green Revolution’s legacy.
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