The sun beats down on Manoj Kumar Kushwaha’s small plot in East Champaran, Bihar. For years, his ritual was straightforward: at sowing time, he would scatter bag after bag of urea across his rice and wheat fields.

He’d apply a hefty 2.5 kilograms of fertiliser per kattha (a local land measure) — a measurement of dose passed down through generations and reinforced by fear. It was an act of faith — faith that more fertiliser meant more grain, and fear that without it, the increasingly fickle rains and baking heat would steal his harvest. The cost was crippling, but it was the insurance premium he thought he had to pay.

A thousand kilometres away, in a conference room in New Delhi, scientists and strategists at the Environmental Defence Fund (EDF) were focused on a different set of numbers. They saw India’s staggering Rs 2 lakh crore annual fertiliser subsidy. They observed that agriculture accounted for 20% of the nation’s greenhouse gases, with nitrogen overuse being a primary contributor. They saw the silent yet potent leak of nitrous oxide, a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, rising from fields like Manoj’s.

But Hisham Mundol, EDF’s Climate Advisor, saw a connection others missed. “Farmers are on the front lines of climate change,” he explains. “They use fertiliser as an insurance policy.” The problem wasn’t carelessness; it was a rational response to a climate of deep uncertainty.

The solution, therefore, couldn’t be a ban or a blame. It had to be a better form of insurance — one that saved money, secured yields, and protected the planet. This became EDF’s non-negotiable “triple win”.

This is the story of how that philosophy took root, beginning with a pilot in 2023, spreading to 50,000 farmers across three states by 2024, and sparking a quiet revolution in measurement and trust.

In the world of agronomy, there is a concept called the “N Balance”. It is the precise calculation between the nitrogen a crop needs and the nitrogen a farmer applies. In India, this balance has been tipped disastrously towards excess.

“Three out of four farmers in Bihar are over-applying nitrogen,” says Ajeet Singh, EDF’s Manager for Climate-Smart Agriculture with over two decades of grassroots experience. The consequences are a cascade of loss: financial loss for the farmer, ecological loss for the soil and water, and a profound cost for the climate.

EDF’s intervention, spearheaded by experts like Samir Mirza, an agricultural engineer on the ground in Maharashtra, began with a simple survey in 2023. Across 20,000 farmers in the states of Maharashtra, Bihar, and Tamil Nadu, they asked 13........

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