India has spent $200 million issuing about 240 million Soil Health Cards since 2015, yet a new study finds the world's largest soil testing programme has changed few fertilizer decisions on the ground.

The research, published in Land Use Policy by Ritwick Ghosh of North Carolina State University and a team at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), examines what happens when a government tries to turn the vague concept of "soil health" into a national administrative programme. The answer: scale came at the cost of substance.

A decade of testing

The Soil Health Card (SHC) scheme, launched in 2015, promises every one of India's roughly 120 million farmers a free soil test report every two years, with crop-specific fertilizer recommendations matched to local conditions. The grid-based sampling system covers 10-hectare cells in rainfed areas and 2.5-hectare cells in irrigated land. To hit those targets, the government modernised 885 existing laboratories and built more than 8,000 new ones, favouring mobile, mini and village-level labs over traditional facilities.

The bet was that better information would curb India's chronic overuse of nitrogenous fertilizers and urea, a legacy of Green Revolution-era subsidies. A decade on, that bet has not paid off.

Farmers know, farmers don't act

Awareness is not the problem. Over 70% of farmers in Telangana reported knowing the scheme and viewing it favourably. In Chhattisgarh, more than 95% expressed medium-to-high approval. A 2017 study for the Ministry of Agriculture put national awareness at 81%.

Behaviour change is the problem. Farmers reported making few adjustments to fertilizer practices despite holding the recommendations in hand. They worried about yield losses, were often unsure whether their own fields had actually been sampled, and struggled to interpret the cards. One study in Haryana found some farmers believed the scheme concerned human health rather than farming.

Where extension agents engaged directly with farmers, uptake rose markedly. Farmers with that support trusted the recommendations more, adjusted fertilizer use, and reported lower input costs and better productivity. Information alone, the authors conclude, does not change practice.

Three structural flaws

The study identifies three constraints. First, the cards measure what is cheapest to quantify: soil chemistry, chiefly nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium. Biological indicators such as microbial activity and soil respiration are absent because they are too costly to assess nationally. The card gives a partial picture of soil health.

Second, the scheme is top-down. Farmers have no say in what gets measured, where samples come from, or how recommendations are generated. The standardised indicators, uniform across states and districts, built a nationwide database but assumed the same metrics matter everywhere across India's diverse ecological and farming systems.

Third, the wider policy environment undercuts the scheme. Urea subsidies keep prices artificially low, making recommended alternatives economically unattractive. Insecure land tenure discourages farmers from investments that cut short-term yields for long-term soil gains.

Lessons beyond India

The findings matter for any government designing soil health programmes at scale. Bureaucratisation, the authors argue, stripped a transformative concept down to a standardised reporting exercise that leaves little room for local knowledge. Their prescription: participatory, locally driven approaches that work directly with farmers rather than mailing them a card and hoping for the best.

For policymakers weighing similar schemes elsewhere, the next question is whether future programmes can pair mass soil testing with the extension support that, in India's case, made the difference between a card in a drawer and a changed fertilizer decision.