New Delhi, Aug 11 - About 45 percent of India's land is degraded, air pollution is increasing in all its cities, it is losing its rare plants and animals more rapidly than before and about one-third of its urban population now lives in slums, says the State of Environment Report India 2009 brought out by the government.

The third official report on the state of India's environment, published after a gap of eight years and released by Minister of State for Environment and Forests Jairam Ramesh here Tuesday, has only one word of cheer - it says India is using 75 percent of the water it can use, and it has 'just enough for the future if it is careful'.

The report, prepared by NGO Development Alternatives under the aegis of the ministry, says 45 percent of India's land area is degraded due to erosion, soil acidity, alkalinity and salinity, waterlogging and wind erosion.

It says the prime causes of land degradation are deforestation, unsustainable farming, mining and excessive groundwater extraction.

On the bright side, the report shows how over two-thirds of the degraded 147 million hectares can be regenerated quite easily, and points out that India's forest cover is gradually increasing.

Ramesh said it would be unrealistic to expect that India's area under forests would go above the current 21 percent, given the competing demands for land. 'Our plan is to have all this 21 percent as high and medium density forests within the next 10 years,' he said. Currently, only two percent of India is under high density forest cover, while medium density forests cover about 10 percent of the land.

Presenting the salient features of the report to the media, Development Alternatives President (Development Enterprises) George C. Varughese said one of its most worrisome findings was that the level of respirable suspended particulate matter -- the small pieces of soot and dust that get inside the lungs -- had gone up in all the 50 cities across India studied by the All India Institute of Medical Sciences and the Central Pollution Control Board.