Agriculture « Suri’s

December 18, 2007

Rain Water Harvesting

Filed under: Agriculture — suri @ 1:15 am

December 15, 2007

Indian Farming Crisis

Filed under: Agriculture — suri @ 7:21 pm

Agriculture Sector, India’s biggest employer, provides work for more than 65% of the Indians. One would imagine, the agriculture, would have been the top most priority of any government and a good percentage of the budget allocated to this sector. Well, it’s indeed an imagination, the reality is quite opposite.

Its one of the most neglected sectors with just a little over 2% of the budget allocated.
Other sectors such as industrial , have unions, associations, forums, but the government sector has none.
Usually the employees of an industry complain about the benefits, the bonus, the facilities, but agriculture is only sector, where it’s employees don’t complain, they simply commit suicides.
Other employees are entitled for loans from the banks, but not the farmers.
A worker or an employee is usually compensated for any loss that he/she sustains on the field. In the case of death, the family is compensated for the loss. In the case of the farmer, there is no such insurance and even worse incase of death, it has to be first proved that it’s a suicide and if the family is lucky they may get some compensation.

While there may be some inherent problems with farming itself such as over use of pesticides & fertilizers, low soil fertility, poor irrigation facilities, ignorance on the part of the farmers etc, the bigger problem is the government’s attitude towards farmers and towards agriculture. In the last decade almost 1.5 lakh farmers died, isn’t this enough for a wake up call ? Or are we waiting for more deaths and more disasters to happen ?

Oh, I’m not done with my blog yet.

We have a role to play, a responsibility to fulfill.

Educate the farmers: There is a wealth of information about farming practices, rain water preservations, irrigation methods and so on so forth. Unfortunately, the farmers don’t have to access to this information. But we do, we can dissipate this information through information kiosks, local radio broadcasts, news papers, fliers, brochures, local panchayats.
Facilitate loans: Low interest or no interest loans should be made accessible to the farmers. Also discourage the farmers from approaching the private money lenders. There is no one succesful way to achieve this.
Forums: Help build forums which would be used to share information; micro lendings.
Food processing & distribution:
Awareness campaigns: