The rapid growth in population, food production, urbanization, and industrialization has accelerated the generation of bio-waste material such as crop residues, animal waste, and municipal solid waste. They wield tremendous impacts on soil health, climate change, and overall environment with pronounced ramifications for developing countries like India. In addition to the previously mentioned challenges, overexploitation of soil is causing the second-generation problems of nutritional disorders, decline in productivity, global warmingedriven climate change, pollution, and so on. Therefore scientific and logical recycling of organics is of prime importance to eradicate the huge piles of bio-waste material in agriculture. It will, firstly, be of benefit to minimizing environmental pollution and, secondly, improve crop productivity, soil carbon status, and soil health in general. Contrary to this, unscientific management of organic waste hold disadvantages such as losses of essential plant nutrients, greenhouse gas emissions (GHG), heavy metal contamination and development of sporadic pathogens harmful to animals and plants. The prime focus of this review is to signify the current prospects of organic waste management in India and their potential in agriculture. The article has comprehensively elaborated on GHG, fertilizer consumption, food grain production, nutrient removal by crops, and constraints of waste recycling. This review further emphasizes through future research needs the need to advance our knowledge regarding bio-waste management, so that we better understand and implement efficient waste management. It is also pertinent to develop a sustainable and ecofriendly agricultural practices so that organic resources mainly in the form of crop residues, animal waste, and municipal solid waste are utilized.

INTRODUCTION

The burden on climate change such as abrupt rainfall pattern, alteration of maximum and minimum mean annual temperature and inflow of solar radiation are increasing globally; these will inevitably impact on land use patterns. Agriculture is the major use of land throughout the world comprising approximately 1.2e1.5 billion ha cropland and 3.5 billion ha of pasture land (Howden et al., 2007). Agriculture depends heavily on steady water supplies, different land use, and management practices. Nevertheless, climate change is likely to disrupt those supplies through floods and droughts. Increased warming may also have a greater effect on countries whose climate is already near or at a temperature limit over which yields reduce or crops fail in the tropics or subtropics. One of the most critical questions regarding climate change is how it would affect the food supply for a growing global population particularly for developing countries. For example, India’s population has remarkably expanded from 369.88 million (in 1947) to 1173.10 million by 2010 and expected to be more than 1460.74 million by 2030 and 1656.6 million by 2050 with the population growth rate of 1.2% in India (Anonymous, 2017, Fig. 1). Similarly, the world’s population is expected to reach 9.7 billion by 2050, 34% higher than current population (7.3 billion) as projected by the Population Division of the Department of Economic and Social Affairs of the United Nations Secretariat (UNDESA, 2015). It has been suggested that higher latitudes may become productive due to global warming, but the soil in the Arctic region and bordering territories is very poor, and the amount of sunlight reaching the ground in summer will not change because it is governed by the tilt of the earth. Agriculture can also be disrupted by wildfires and changes in seasonal periodicity, which is already taking place, and changes to grasslands and water supplies could impact on grazing and welfare of domestic livestock. Now, researchers have been overlooking the two key human responses to climate changes, specifically (1) how much land people choose to farm and (2) the number of crops that will have an impact on agriculture in the future. Crop yields have already been affected by these changes to some extent, but it is not clear if future changes will be catastrophic or not. It could affect crop growth and quality, livestock health, and pests.