“…In comparison to biodegradable polymer based controlled release systems, the controlled release fertilizer formulations of nondegradable polymers are found to be quite harmful in reducing the soil fertility due to the presence of residual nondegradable polymers in the soils after the release of loaded agrochemicals (Raut et al, 2013;Poratkar and Raut, 2013;Naz and Sulaiman, 2016;Paul et al, 2019). Thus controlled release formulations for fertilizers based on degradable polymers are found to be useful in overcoming the environmental problem (Chien et al, 2009;Fereydun et al, 2018) and in maintaining an optimum amount of agrochemicals in the soil (Azeem et al, 2014;Pourjavadi et al, 2011). To fulfill these objectives, the control release formulations for agrochemicals (Quinones et al, 2010;Raafat et al, 2012) or drugs are developed based on either polyvinyl alcohol (Kulkani et al, 2010) or polyacrylamide alone or in combination with naturally occurring biodegradable polymers such as; guar gum (Saruchi et al, 2019), starch (Jo et al, 1992), alginate (Bidarra et al, 2014;Dalmoro et al, 2012;Samanta and Ray, 2014;Zhang et al, 2015;Idris et al, 2008), cellulose derivatives (Hou et al, 2019) and chitosan (Yang et al, 2014;Choudhary et al, 2016;Rakhshaei et al, 2019).…”