Recovering the Missing Middle: A National Silt Productisation and Commercialisation Strategy
As the monsoon enters its last month, I have, over the past several weeks, watched the season do what it always does here: gather itself over the ridges, break, and run downhill. Rainwater moves fast through slopes — down the nalas into the streams, and eventually into the Ganga, carrying with it a fine suspension of the very soil it just fell on. It is easy, watching this, to think of it only as loss: topsoil that will not return to the field it came from, fertility quietly leaving the hills for the plains. But the water does not destroy what it carries. It relocates it. Somewhere downstream — in a riverbed, a reservoir, a delta — that same soil settles, waits, and accumulates. What leaves a hillside field as erosion arrives somewhere else as silt . This is not a new observation. It is, in fact, close to the founding insight of the Gangetic plain itself, whose fertility was built by exactly this process over centuries. What is new — or ought to be new — is the policy attention si...