The Nitrogen Bomb

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The Nitrogen Bomb is a work of narrative science nonfiction that argues that India’s air-pollution crisis cannot be fully understood without understanding nitrogen. Drawing on nearly two decades of reporting on science, environment, energy, and climate, Jacob Koshy examines a major but little-discussed driver of India’s PM2.5 burden: the ammonia released from agricultural urea, which reacts with industrial and vehicular emissions to form the fine particulate matter that engulfs cities like Delhi every winter. Despite a growing body of research on this link, no Indian trade book has yet brought this story to the general reader.

But the agriculture-pollution connection is only one strand of a much larger story. The Nitrogen Bomb traces humanity’s relationship with nitrogen — the element that sustains life while also lying behind some of the gravest environmental crises of our time. From fertiliser runoff and groundwater contamination to particulate pollution and greenhouse gases, the same element that feeds populations is also damaging ecosystems, polluting water, and warming the atmosphere.

The book moves from Lavoisier and Haber-Bosch to the Green Revolution, fertiliser subsidies, MSP politics, the farm laws, and the current nano-urea debate, while also exploring how India’s food security remains tied to global energy and shipping routes. Written in the tradition of narrative science nonfiction such as Vaclav Smil’s Enriching the Earth and Thomas Hager’s The Alchemy of Air, The Nitrogen Bomb places the Indo-Gangetic Plain at the centre of a global story about chemistry, agriculture, politics, and survival.