1 Journal of Oilseed Brassica, 12 (1) January, 2021 Journal of Oilseed Brassica, 12 (1) : 1-8, January 2021 Review paper Soil health management for enhancing productivity of Indian mustard (Brassica juncea L.) Mahesh C Meena*, Ganpat Louhar and Abir Dey Division of Soil Science and Agricultural Chemistry, ICAR-Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi 110012, India *Corresponding author: mcmeena@gmail.com (Received: 3 August 2020, Revised: 15 October 2020, Accepted: 20 November 2020) Abstract Indian mustard is the third most important oilseed crop in India. The mustard crop and its produce are critical in country’s food security, nutritional security and over-all financial security. The challenge in satisfactory level of mustard production lies in the fact that multi-nutrient deficiencies being critical to mustard production, often is prevalent in mustard growing regions of the country which continuously possess hurdles in the way of enhanced mustard productivity along with other soil health related issues. These issues needs to be immediately dealt with site-specific nutrient management practices along with addressing the multi-nutrient deficiencies in mustard growing regions to achieve good productivity. A good nutrient management approach not only improves soil health, and nutrient supplying capacity, but also improves the productivity and quality of seeds in mustard. In the present review, different nutrient management approaches and their effects on soil health and mustard productivity is discussed. Keywords: Integrated nutrient management, Indian mustard, organic manures, sulphur fertilization Introduction Indian mustard (Brassica juncea L.) is a major oilseed crop belonging to Cruciferae family. India is ranked third in production of rapeseed-mustard after Canada and China. Mustard is the third most important oilseed crops after soybean and groundnut in India occupying 5.96 Mha acreage, 8.32 MT production and the average productivity of 1.39 t/ha (Fig. 1) (GOI, 2019). Major states producing mustard are Rajasthan, Punjab, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, West Bengal and Gujarat. Rajasthan ranks first in both area and production of mustard. Among oilseed Brassica species, Brassica juncea covered major area which contributes about 80% of the total rapeseed-mustard grown in the country. Its seed contains 37 to 49 per cent oil. The oil cake is used as cattle feed and manure, which contains about 4.9 per cent nitrogen, 2.5 per cent phosphorus and 1.5 per cent potash. The role of soil health and fertility on crop production in Indian condition is gaining topical importance nowadays. Constant decline in soil fertility status is considered as one of the serious second-generation problems of post- Green Revolution era (Dwivedi and Meena, 2015). Recently, Indian soils have been assessed based on coordinated soil samples on sulphur (S) and micronutrient delineation and the report indicated that more than 41% soils are deficient in S, 43% in Zn, 14.4% in Fe, 6.1% in Cu, 7.9% in Mn and 20.6% deficient in B (Shukla et al., 2016a; Shukla et al., 2016b). The exhaustive removals of nutrients by crops from the soils as well as use of inadequate and imbalanced fertilizer are resulting in multi- nutrient deficiencies in soils and plants. In major mustard growing areas of the country, widespread multi-nutrient deficiencies have been reported involving 2 to 6 nutrients including NK, NKS, NKB, NPKS, NKSZn and NPKSZnB in the 14 agro-ecological sub-regions (Meena et al., 2017). For mustard crop, S is the most important nutrient due to its role in metabolic processes of plant and oil synthesis in seeds. Majority of mustard growing soils of India are deficient in S, in turn limiting the crop production. Major Fig. 1: Area, production and yield of mustard in India