Illustrated: India’s Temperature Crisis caused by Urea penetration into Soil

As of May 25, 2026, 97 of the world's 100 hottest cities were in India. The climate story gets a lot of attention; the agriculture story hides inside it.

Every single spot in the world's top 50 hottest cities list belonged to India. New Delhi, Prayagraj (UP), Wardha (MH), Khajuraho (MP), Ahmedabad (GJ), Vijayawada (AP), Balangir (OD) — entire cities crossing 46°C before noon.

Climate change is doing a great deal of this. But inside that larger story is a more specific one: the way India fertilizes its farmland is contributing to the heat, and to the conditions that make the heat worse. And the compound at the center of that story is one most Indians have never thought twice about — Urea.

Illustrated: Comparing India's Pre-Monsoon Years 1977, 2026

What is Urea?

Urea is a nitrogen-rich synthetic compound — the most concentrated solid nitrogen fertilizer available — first synthesized in 1828 and industrially produced since the early twentieth century using natural gas as its primary feedstock. Before 1977, India did not subsidize urea. 

When the oil shock of 1973 sent input costs spiraling and food security looked fragile, the government stepped in with a price-support scheme. It was a reasonable intervention for an unreasonable moment. What nobody fully accounted for was the half-century of soil chemistry — and atmospheric chemistry — that would follow.

When urea is applied to soil and not fully absorbed by the crop, it does two things. It leaches into groundwater as nitrate. And it escapes into the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas 300 times more powerful than carbon dioxide, and has already replaced methane as the second largest greenhouse gas emitted from Indian agriculture. N₂O emissions have risen 40% from 1980 to 2020, mainly due to agricultural use of nitrogen-rich fertilizers. In India, N₂O emissions from synthetic fertilization accounted for 57% of total agricultural N₂O output in 2017.

The fields that overapply urea are not just losing nitrogen. They are warming the air above them. The conversation around soil health, organic fertilizer, bio farming, and better farming solutions is no longer separate from the climate conversation. It sits inside it.

Illustrated: Shift in India's Fertilizer Consumption in 40+ Years

Between 1980 and 2023, fertilizer consumption in India increased from 31.95 kg per hectare to 136.05 kg per hectare. The fiscal burden of fertilizer subsidies surged from ₹505 crore in 1980–81 to ₹2,25,220 crore in 2022–23. That is a 450-fold increase in forty years.

Today, urea is fixed at ₹242 per 45-kg bag, while DAP costs approximately ₹1,350 per 50-kg bag and MOP runs between ₹1,525 and ₹1,650 per 50-kg. These are not market prices. They are policy choices. And they produce a perfectly predictable outcome: farmers buy what is affordable, which means they buy nitrogen, and they buy a lot of it. Meanwhile, organic plant fertilizers, bio stimulant systems, microbial crop nutrition, and organic farming products remain structurally under-supported despite improving long-term soil performance.

The urea subsidy alone stands at approximately ₹1.19 lakh crore for FY 2025–26. P, K fertilizer support combined amounts to ₹49,000 crore. Nitrogen receives two-and-a-half times the state backing of phosphorus and potassium together. The result is an NPK consumption ratio of 10.9:4.4:1 against the desirable 4:2:1.

The full policy timeline, briefly: 

• 1977: Retention Price Scheme: Guaranteed manufacturer margins, subsidized urea 
• 2003: Concession Scheme 
• 2010: Nutrient Based Subsidy system | P and K imbalance, urea excluded 
• 2015: Neem-coated urea was mandated to improve efficiency
• 2021: Nano Urea, rolled out by IFFCO from 2021, is a genuine efficiency step
• 2023: PM PRANAM scheme | incentivizing states to reduce chemical fertilizer
  encouraging biotechnology agriculture and lower synthetic dependency
  

Is Urea Even Cheap? Or Just Subsidized?

This is worth sitting with for a moment.

A bag of urea at ₹242 feels cheap at the point of purchase. But nutrient use efficiency in India sits at only 35 to 40%. 

What is nutrient use efficiency? 

Nutrient use efficiency is the difference between the fertilizer a farmer pays for and the fertilizer a crop actually absorbs. In India, that gap has become dangerously large.

More than 60 to 65% of every applied kilogram is lost to the atmosphere, groundwater, or soil binding. The farmer pays for a full bag. The crop sees less than half of it. The rest becomes a liability — in groundwater nitrate, in N₂O emissions, in soil acidification that then requires corrective inputs.

A well-made organic fertilizer — compost, a quality bio-stimulant, a botanical extract, microbial plant growth promoter, organic growth booster, or carefully formulated organic plant nutrition system applied correctly — releases nutrients slowly, in sync with root absorption cycles, supported by the microbial community that multiplies around it. The organic fertilizer cost per bag may be higher. The cost per unit of nutrition delivered to the crop is, in many documented cases, competitive. The cost to the soil over five seasons is not comparable at all.

The question is whether farmers even care more about downstream impact over upfront cost. Most do. Most have to. On a two-acre holding with a margin of a few thousand rupees per season, the ₹242 bag is real and the soil carbon depletion is abstract. This is not a character flaw. It is a rational response to a price signal the government has been sending for 50 years.

Has Urea Done Any Good? 

Yes. Significantly. It is worth being honest here.

Food grain production in India rose from about 25 million tonnes in 1950 to around 100 million tonnes by 1980. Punjab alone was producing 70% of the country's total food grains by 1970, with farmers' incomes growing by over 70%. India went from importing grain to exporting it. Famines that had killed millions in the colonial period did not return. By 1983–84, per capita income in Punjab was ₹3,560 compared to a national average of ₹2,288 — a measurable, real improvement in living standards for millions of farming families.

Illustrated: India's Soil Efficiency Through 70 Years

The Green Revolution helped farmers raise their income. Big farmers with more than 10 hectares of land were particularly benefited, investing surplus in agricultural productivity. Urea was central to all of this. The fertilizer-grain response ratio in the 1970s was 1:10 — one kilogram of input reliably produced ten kilograms of grain. At that ratio, urea was genuinely transformative.

The problem is that the ratio has since collapsed. By 2015, the fertilizer-to-grain response had dropped from 1:10 to 1:2.7. The same input, applied in the same fields, now delivers a fraction of its original return. The soil that made the Green Revolution possible has been so heavily drawn upon, with so little biological replenishment, that it can no longer respond the way it once did. This is precisely where biotechnology farming, microbial supplementation, botanical extracts, and regenerative organic farming products begin mattering economically, not just environmentally.

Fertilizer use in potato, sugarcane, cotton, wheat, and paddy is currently at 165-350.2 kg/ha, and among all of these, excessive nitrogenous fertilizer use is a documented pattern.

In Maharashtra's sugarcane cooperatives, excess nitrogen has pushed vegetative growth at the expense of sucrose recovery — sugar yields per ton of cane have been declining. In Rajasthan's cumin belt, the absence of Sulphur and Zinc alongside nitrogen has reduced essential oil concentration, the metric that export buyers pay a premium for. In Vidarbha's cotton districts, the input-to-output squeeze has been accumulating for years — a soil that cannot respond to inputs the way it once did, a fertilizer price that does not adequately recover the cost of trying. This is also why conversations around organic fungicide, non chemical pesticides, organic pesticides, organic pest control, and residue-free crop systems are increasing across India.

Every global shock increases India's fiscal subsidy burden and threatens domestic food security, creating a strong parallel to the 1970s oil crisis that first triggered the subsidy in the first place.

The policy signals are now clearer than they have been in a generation. PM Modi, at a gathering in Secunderabad in May 2026, told farmers directly: "We import chemical fertilizers in large quantities from abroad. We should reduce our consumption of chemical fertilizers by half and move towards natural farming using organic fertilizers." He has made versions of this argument repeatedly — at public gatherings, at cooperative inaugurations, at budget addresses. 

The PM PRANAM scheme has already resulted in 14 states reducing chemical fertilizer consumption by 1.51 million tonnes in 2023–24 compared to the three-year average, with 50% of the saved subsidy returned to those states as development grants.

The architecture is moving — haltingly, politically constrained, but moving.

Illustrated: Fertilizer Subsidy Distribution, India | 2026

The organic fertilizer subsidy in India, across all schemes combined, remains a fraction of what urea receives. Paramparagat Krishi Vikas Yojana offers ₹50,000 per hectare for three years of organic transition, with ₹31,000 directly allocated to farmers for organic inputs. Spread across the season, this is meaningful support — but it reaches fewer than 40 lakh hectares against the 140 million hectares of farmland India carries.

The arithmetic of the subsidy gap is not subtle. When urea gets ₹1.19 lakh crore and organic farming support gets a few thousand crore, the price signal at the markets is clear. It takes either exceptional conviction, or exceptional market access to premium buyers, or both, to choose the more expensive path.

What changes that equation is not ideology. It is a demonstrated result. A farmer who has watched their soil recover over three seasons — who has seen input costs flatten, who has seen crop quality improve, who has found a buyer willing to pay more for what that quality produces — makes a different calculation than a farmer who has only ever been told that organic is better.

Where is this going?

Lacgene Technologies has spent more than fifteen years developing, testing, and deploying biological and organic inputs on Indian farmland — not as an alternative to science, but as an application of it. The R&D is practical, the patents are filed, and the products have been through enough seasons in enough soil types to carry numbers behind them. The company has tracked not merely market sentiment and trends, but prioritized on-ground field results.

The direction India is moving — reduced chemical dependency, better soil health, balanced crop nutrition, biological supplementation — is the direction Lacgene has been building toward since 2010. Not because it was fashionable, but because the data made it obvious.

Cities burning beyond 46°C are a reminder that the cost of the old system is no longer abstract. It is showing up in real-time temperature readings, in nitrous oxide that will warm the atmosphere for over 116 years, in soils that respond to inputs at a quarter of the rate they once did.

The shift toward farming better is not a brand proposition. At this point, it is the only rational direction the numbers point.