Despite slow adoption by farmers, Indian Farmers Fertiliser Cooperative Limited (IFFCO), the biggest producer of soil nutrients, is aiming to replace 10% of the country’s conventional fertilizer use through their nano-variants in the next few years, a senior official of the cooperative said.
“We are progressing steadily toward replacing 10% of the country’s total consumption of conventional urea and diammonium phosphate (DAP) with nano urea plus and nano DAP over the next 3–4 years,” K J Patel, MD, IFFCO, said in a message to stakeholders.
The government has been giving priority to nano fertilisers with a view to cutting extensive use of highly subsidised conventional fertilizers. India consumes 65 million tonne (MT) to 70 MT of conventional fertilizers annually.
In June 2021, IFFCO had launched nano urea in liquid form as an alternative to conventional urea. In March, 2023 the fertiliser cooperative major had launched nano-DAP, which aimed at decreasing the country’s import dependence on soil nutrient variety.
Adoption Gap
However, adoption of the liquid version of nano – urea and DAP has been slow compared to installed manufacturing capacities. Sources said that against annual manufacturing capacity of 289.5 million bottles (500 ml each) of nano urea and DAP, the actual sales have been around 36 to 40 million bottles.
Patel had earlier acknowledged that nano-fertilisers’ utilisation or knowledge among farmers and the outreach programme have remained inadequate.
IFFCO in FY26 reported sales of 30.1 million bottles of nano fertilisers including 22.1 million bottles of urea and 6.48 million bottles of nano liquid variants of DAP.
Recently, the nano variants of nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), and potassium (K) – NPK, first of its kind formulations which integrate both foliar and basal application methods and have been approved under the fertiliser control order (FCO).
Synergistic Yields
According to the draft finding of the study by the national productivity council (NPC) on evaluation and efficiency on nano urea compared to conventional variant (2024-2026) has indicated that while the basal dose must continue to be supplied through conventional urea, which remains essential even when nano variant is used.
“Combined application, conventional urea as basal and nano Urea as foliar, has shown 1.65% to 14.82% increase in crop yield, depending on the crop, based on farmer feedback,” according to the NPC draft report.
In addition to nano fertilizers, Patel said that the focus of the cooperative measure would on biofertilizers and biostimulants will help rejuvenate soil health and support the government achieving the objectives of central sector scheme PM-PRANAM, aimed at promoting balanced and sustainable fertilizer use.
Under the scheme, the states were to be compensated or grant financial resources equivalent to 50% of the fertilizer subsidy saved in a particular financial year by way of reduction in consumption of urea, DAP, NPK and muriate of potash (MOP) compared to previous three years’ average consumption.
For 2025-26, the cooperative major sold 11.87 MT of conventional fertilisers – 7.57 MT (urea), 2.75 MT (DAP), 1.54 MT (NPK) against the estimated consumption of close to 70 MT of soil nutrients in the country.
It produced 9.06 MT of fertilisers last fiscal which included 4.82 MT of urea.
For FY26, IFFCO has projected profit before tax to surpass the earlier record of ₹ 4,106 crores achieved in FY 2022–23.