Soil Health Card Scheme

• The Government has introduced Soil Health Card Scheme in all States/UTs with an aim to assist all State Governments to evaluate fertility in all farm holdings across the country and issue soil health cards to farmers regularly in a cycle of 2 years.
• Soil Health Cards provide information to farmers on nutrient status of their soil along with recommendations on appropriate dosage of nutrients to be applied for improving soil health and its fertility.
• Launched by the central government in February 2015, the scheme is tailor-made to issue ‘Soil card’ to farmers which will carry crop-wise recommendations of nutrients and fertilizers required for the individual farms. 
• This is aimed to help farmers to improve productivity through judicious use of inputs.
• In order to improve quality of soil and ultimately for better nutrient values and higher yields, experts say while at present, general fertilizer recommendations are followed by farmers for primary nutrients, the secondary and micro nutrients are often overlooked. 
• This has become a limiting factor in increasing food productivity. The Soil Health Card scheme will address these.
• At present, general fertilizer recommendations are followed by farmers for primary nutrients (N, P & K). 
• However, secondary and micro nutrients are often overlooked leading to deficiency of nutrients like Sulphur, Zinc and Boron. 
• Keeping this in view, Government of India is promoting soil test based balanced and judicious use of chemical fertilizers, along with bio-fertilizers and locally available organic manures.
• It is for the first time that Government of India has launched Soil Health Card scheme to cover 14 crore holdings once in a cycle of 3 years to promote soil management practices and restore soil health.
• Nationally agreed norms / standards of 10 ha for rainfed areas and 2.5 ha for irrigated areas will be applied for soil sample collection. 
• By implication, a total of 2.53 crore samples will be collected and tested to generate 14 crore soil health cards to individual farmers, once in 3 years.  
• The target for the year 2015-16 is 84 lakh of samples, against which 34 lakh samples have already been collected.