The global agricultural sector sits at a critical inflection point. Geopolitical volatility and unpredictable energy markets have exposed the deep vulnerabilities of our food systems, making nutrient security a non-negotiable priority for governments worldwide. For India, this global instability hits particularly hard. As agriculture remains the cornerstone of our economy, our farmers are currently weathering the dual storms of rising cultivation costs and supply chain inconsistencies.
Indian agriculture has transitioned admirably over the last many decades, growing from a food-deficit nation to today feeding nearly one-fifth of the world. Yet the coming decades present a new set of tests. We are asked to support 18% of the global population with just 2.4% of the world’s land and 4% of its fast-depleting freshwater.
These constraints are compounded by the land itself. Nearly 36% of India’s geographical area suffers from degradation, including widespread issues with salinity and soil acidity — and the trend is not stabilizing. Successive national land degradation assessments have shown the degraded share of India’s geography rising at every check-in over the last two decades, not falling. Layer erratic weather patterns and the financial burden of inputs onto these systemic challenges, and it becomes increasingly clear that our existing approach is reaching its limits.
We no longer need to simply produce more. We need to produce more resiliently.
Fertilisers remain indispensable, yet we are plagued by inefficiency and that inefficiency now carries a price tag India can measure precisely. ICAR estimates that Nitrogen Use Efficiency sits at only 30–45%, and Phosphorus Use Efficiency at just 15–25%. In practical terms, more than half of the nitrogen and roughly three-quarters of the phosphorus applied to Indian fields each season never becomes grain, fruit, or fibre. It is either lost to the environment or locked away in forms the plant cannot use.
This isn’t a marginal leak. India’s fertiliser subsidy for FY 2025–26 stands at ~ ₹1.92 lakh crore or ~ 3.3% of the entire Union Budget. Meanwhile, our exposure to that inefficiency is compounded by import dependence. India sources close to 100% of its potash and well over 90% of its rock phosphate from abroad, so every inefficient kilogram applied is also a kilogram of imported vulnerability. The imbalance shows up starkly in how we actually apply nutrients — India’s N:P:K use ratio, ideally close to 4:2:1, has drifted to nearly 12:5:1 over the past three decades, as cheap, subsidised nitrogen has pulled far ahead of balanced phosphorus and potassium use.
The question is no longer how to apply fertilisers. It is how to derive greater value from every kilogram we already apply.
Nutrient Use Efficiency (NUE) is not a single number — agronomists have long decomposed it into three multiplied components:
- Availability (how much of the applied nutrient is available to the plant)
- Uptake efficiency (how much of the available nutrient the plant actually absorbs) and
- Utilisation efficiency (how effectively the plant converts what it absorbs into harvestable yield).
Almost every intervention India has scaled to date, chemical fertilisers, slow-release coatings, nitrogen-fixing and phosphate-solubilising biofertilisers work on a third, entirely earlier stage of the NUE problem- availability focusing on getting the nutrient into the soil or root zone in a form that exists to be taken up. That focus made sense when availability was the binding constraint. It no longer is. Two further bottlenecks sit downstream of availability, inside the plant itself and neither shows up on a soil test.
The first is uptake. Once a nutrient reaches the root zone, the plant still has to actively absorb it through root transporters and convert it biochemically into a usable form. Nitrate reduced to nitrite to ammonium, then assimilated into amino acids; phosphorus mobilised through phosphatase enzymes and specific transport proteins. This conversion step is frequently rate-limiting, and it is invisible to every tool we currently use to diagnose nutrient status in a field.
The second is utilisation — how efficiently the plant translocates and remobilizes assimilated nutrients toward grain, fruit or fibre rather than losing them to inefficient allocation. Under heat, drought or salinity stress which an increasing number of Indian growing seasons now include. Plants routinely reallocate resources toward survival and defence rather than yield formation. A nutrient can be fully available and fully absorbed and still fail to become yield, because the plant, under stress, chose not to spend it that way.
Both these bottlenecks are governed by plant enzymatic activity, hormonal signalling and metabolic pathways — not soil chemistry. That is precisely why they cannot be solved by just better fertiliser formulation, however efficiently delivered. They can only be addressed biologically through molecules and enzyme-activating compounds capable of directly influencing the plant’s own physiological machinery. Early trial work in this space, including our own work, has linked such biological interventions to multi-fold increases in nitrogen-assimilating enzyme activity, translating into measurable yield gains even at reduced fertiliser doses — evidence that the assimilation and utilisation stages are not just theoretically addressable, but practically so.
The emerging consensus suggests that when traditional fertilisers are integrated with this kind of biological intelligence, they transcend simple nutrition to deliver sophisticated, multi-faceted plant health benefits. Unlike inputs that only deliver nutrients, integrated biological solutions act as a force multiplier — operating across all three levers, availability, assimilation, and utilisation, to optimise nutrient uptake, improve resource efficiency, and build long-term agronomic resilience.
This is where NUE comes fully to the fore, not as a single-stage fix but as a full-chain one. Done right, this approach serves two vital needs simultaneously: It maximises output from current input levels rather than forcing farmers to increase dosages, keeping the cost of cultivation stable; and it strengthens crops against the abiotic stress — heat, drought, salinity — that farmers now routinely manage within a single growing season.
India’s growing emphasis on biological solutions, combined with rising farmer interest and policy support, reflects a broader recognition that sustainability and productivity must advance together, not compete. The future of nutrient management will not be defined by a conflict between biologicals and chemicals, but by their effective integration across every stage a nutrient travels — from soil, to root, to grain.
The change this demands is more than a technical upgrade. It is rebalancing of our agricultural systems: an urgent, necessary shift toward a model that safeguards productivity today while embedding resilience into the very fabric of Indian agriculture for tomorrow.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Renuka Diwan, co-founder & CEO, BioPrime® AgriSolutions Pvt. Ltd.
