Farming as an occupation has been given little importance by the
government and urban society. Basic services such as electricity are hard to
come by. A change in the mindset of people is the need of the hour. I am
often asked by my friends living in cities as to what I do on the farm or how I
spend my time. Don't I get bored? How do I manage without television, and so
on. When I tell them that I am engaged in farming, they look at me with
suspicion as if I am covering up my idleness. Though this type of interrogation
infuriates me, I have somehow resisted the temptation to ask whether teaching
disinterested students "irony" in Jane Austen for two decades,
practicing medicine without compassion or building matchbox houses meant for
human habitation in the name of slum development, are all professions more
intellectually rewarding, ethical and useful than farming. Then there are the
comrades who speak for the farmer and for whom real farmers are only those who
till the land and are poor and illiterate. Others employing labour are to be
equated with exploitative landlords. It does not occur to them that living in
cities and paying less than minimum wages to domestics and overworking them is
also exploitation. In this country, we have always been told that 70 per
cent of the Indian population live in villages and are engaged in agriculture,
though I am told that recently this percentage has come down in 50 years by a
majestic five per cent.
Simultaneously,
we read about large scale migration into cities and expanding slums as a result
of such migration. Whatever the percentage, there is lack of understanding
about people engaged in agriculture. No one feels the necessity to learn about
rural areas or agriculture, because it is not required "general
knowledge". Even public service examinations do not require the candidates
to know anything about agriculture except perhaps statistics relating to five
year plan outlays for agriculture or the recent National Agriculture Policy,
which may have very little to do with farmers and more to do with traders
promoting agribusiness companies. Batch after batch of administrators, who have
no understanding of farming or agriculture, make policy decisions affecting
millions of lives in rural areas. For the majority of the city-bred,
educated, urban middle class, farming is just a boring activity and meant for
people who are unfit to perform salaried jobs in the city. More recently
however, owning farms has become fashionable among the yuppy generation, as a
safe investment, or a weekend getaway. Farms have mushroomed close to big
cities on the lines of extended home gardens and are managed by real estate
companies. A small number of people from urban areas in recent years have
returned to the villages because of the deteriorating quality of life in the
cities and sometimes with the intention of making farming a way of life. Among
the reasons for this lack of respect for the farmer is that the city population
is alienated from its links with the village from where they originally came.
The earlier generations of city dwellers left behind their extended families in
the villages.
Their growing
children visited their ancestral homes during vacations and maintained some
links with villages. For most in the city, this interaction with the village
does not exist anymore. Images of the early-rising, hard-working farmer
and that of the idle, unproductive farmer persist. A familiar statement is that
the Indian farmer is under-employed and works only during the rainy season. The
farmers would not have been able to survive if they did not work during the dry
months. No one thinks of politicians and administrators as underemployed. The
farmer is expected to work in the fields and earn his keep even if that means
just eking out a hand-to-mouth existence. The farmers substitute their
income in the non-monsoon months by wage labour in the nearby towns and cities
or migrate to areas where they can find work. Farmers growing perennials have a
lot of preparation to do before the onset of the next rains such as taking
measures to conserve the soil moisture by mulching. If mulch is not readily
available, it has to be brought from neighbouring community lands.
Considering how
erratic the rainfall patterns are, the summer agricultural operations have to
be done methodically. The rains have done a repeat performance of last
year and the cotton crop in the fields surrounding my farm are drying up,
though the statement from the agricultural department issued to the press said
that there has been normal rainfall in the Mysore taluk and surrounding areas.
The Karnataka Power Corporation is sanctioning new pumpsets when it cannot
provide enough power to existing pumpset owners. Upon enquiry I found out that
for sometime they had withdrawn permission to those who went ahead with their
plans of digging borewells (sometimes within 500 metres of existing borewells)
by not sanctioning power. This was six months ago but now they have started
giving connections to the errant farmer if he paid Rs. 10,000/- fine to the
Power Corporation. The Karnataka Electricity Board has been re- christened as
the Karnataka Power Transmission Corporation.
Its
metamorphosis from a board to a corporation has not seen any great improvement
in the services provided to consumers and especially to farmers like me who
have to be grateful for one full day of uninterrupted power. We shall not talk of the marketing facilities available because
much lip service has already been rendered by the elected representatives and
the appointed officers in the agriculture and horticulture departments. Most
farmers are still in the clutches of contractors and middlemen. The government
has set up institutions for the "benefit" of the farmers that buy the
produce at such low prices that it has no relation to production and
transportation costs. About a month ago, a senior officer of the department of
horticulture, was reported in this newspaper as having said that Mysore
district and its vast hinterland is very suitable for growing horticultural
crops and is already producing a very large quantity of fruits and vegetables.
He deplored the lack of good marketing facilities for the farmer, resulting in
a huge loss of these perishables and this situation has arisen inspite of the
existence of two premier institutions CFTRI (Central Food and Technological
Research Institute) and the DFRL (Defence Food Research Laboratory) which can
help in making food processing technologies available to the farmer.
A week later
CFTRI's contribution to the food industry was lauded by an academic
heavyweight. Passing the buck and blaming one another seems the best way to
avoid responsibility for failure. What the Minister of State Agriculture,
marketing, had to say was also reported. Karnataka has decided in
principle to set up farmer bazaars on the models of Tamil Nadu and Andhra
Pradesh to prevent the exploitation of farmers by middlemen! The bazaars, the
Minister said, would help farmers have direct access to the market and the
consumers also would benefit by them. The Minister, I am sure, is
well-intentioned, but, for the success of the bazaars, co-ordination between
several ministries is necessary, especially that of transport. This is
precisely where all the well-intentioned measures fail. The horticulture
department gives subsidies for drip irrigation but the electricity department
cannot guarantee power supply. Basic services in the rural areas such as
electricity (even for agriculture) and transport facilities are in a miserable
condition. Urban areas get priority in almost everything, from schooling to
electrification, telephones, roads, transport and hospital facilities.
The tremendous
pressure put on the land by man and animals is rapidly degrading the lands.
Converting the overgrazed dry lands in rain-starved belts into productive lands
is work that may take years. It is of utmost importance that municipalities and
corporations make efforts to return the farm wastes back to the villages by
encouraging households, markets and hotels that generate a lot of waste to
separate the garbage at source so that this wealth is not lost to land. The
cities can help in reviving the dying soils by returning the organic wastes
back to the villages. Writing 60 years ago in his classic, An Agricultural
Testament, Sir Albert Howard wrote about the importance of utilising town
wastes.
"The human
population, for the most part concentrated in towns and villages, is maintained
almost exclusively by the land. Apart from the harvest of the sea,
agriculture provides the food of the people and the requirements of vegetable
and animal origin needed by the factories of the urban areas. It follows that a
large portion of the waste products of farming must be found in the towns and
away from the fields which produced them. One of the consequences, therefore,
of the concentration of the human population in small areas has been to
separate, often by considerable distances, an important portion of the wastes
of agriculture from the land... From the point of view of farming, the
towns have become parasites. They will last under the present system only as
long as the earth's fertility lasts. Then the whole fabric of our civilisation
must collapse."
Courtesy
PUSHPA SURENDRA
In The Hindu magazine section dated September 17, 2000
