Summary and Concluding Remarks

The treatise of micromorphology on soils and paleosols of India ends with a chapter “Summary and Concluding Remarks,” which is a concise but precious account of the relentless research efforts of soil and earth scientists in comprehending the pedogenic processes, landscape evolution, climatic changes, diagenetic overprinting, and fluvial stratigraphy in major soil types and paleosols of tropical Indian environments. Though a lot of research is now available on soils of the tropics, it has always been difficult to manage these soils to sustain their productivity due to the long absence of comprehensive knowledge on their formation. Thus, the soils need to be constantly explored with advanced techniques as an important research agenda in the Indian context. In this task, a dire need for basic pedological research was felt necessary to understand some of the unresolved edaphological aspects of the tropical Indian soils to develop improved management practices. During the last few decades, much better knowledge was made available when the focus of soil research changed qualitatively due to the use of high-resolution micromorphology and submicroscopy as important tools, which provides a great advantage over chemical methods to follow the complexity of the pedogenic process in soils and paleosols, especially when the micromorphological features were supplemented and complimented by the use of geomorphic history of landscapes alongside the use of high resolution mineralogical and age-control information. The new knowledge helped in comprehending the subtle pedogenic processes of both the recent and ancient soils (paleosols) in the alluvium of the Deccan basalt, Indo-Gangetic Alluvial Plains (IGP), and the desert soils of the Thar. In the following paragraphs, some important micromorphological features of Indian tropical soils and paleosols of the Himalayan foreland basin that have helped to comprehend the subtle pedogenic and paleopedogenic processes, and the new knowledge developed through micromorphological studies are highlighted.