Of India Shining and Rotting Grain
Callous policies have been the bane of politicians says ANTHONY J SIMOES
In the late 1980’s, there was a private bus called ‘Rukmini’ which plied between Siolim and Panjim via Anjuna, Calangute, Candolim, Pilerne and Verem. The conductor was a short, dark, scruffy looking character whose walk was a waddle. He treated all his passengers like royalty. This bus was used during noon time by women transporting liquor from Pernem to places in the south. Because of his walk and laid back ways, these women had rechristened the conductor as cansulo (tortoise).
One day, a woman on his bus spilled some rice which she was carrying in a bag, on to the floor of the bus. This was the only time I ever saw cansulo get agitated and he even lost his cool. He even raised his voice as he said to the lady, ‘Kitem tu kortai go bai. Yi amchi Laxmi mungo!’ Then he sat down to salvage the spilt rice with a care bordering on reverence, as if a profane act had to be balanced by a sacred one.
From the Vedic period, food has been invested with an aura of respect and reverence. It is sad that this respect has been destroyed by those in charge of procurement and storage, particularly when we are classified as a nation with the largest number of under and malnourished children, women and men in the world. Our farmers are confronted with the challenge of producing food for 1.2 billion human beings and over 1 billion farm animals. The demoralising impact of the indifference shown to the safe storage of grains produced by hard labour in sun and rain by millions of farm women and men can only be imagined.
The callous attitude of our politicians and policy makers is the stuff that horror stories are made of. For them, a peasant is not a person who keeps us all alive by producing food. He is a factor of production like the muck and manure that he works in.
The view from Udyog Bhavan is of fertiliser subsidies, crop insurance, credit, etc… In other words, everything but people. If a peasant commits suicide, it is just another statistic. Good for a numbers game during the next election. It does not occur to them that somewhere there is a wife and child who think that the sun rises and sets because of the peasant.
Cansulo was a peasant from June to September. He worked in someone’s field during the monsoon. He saw how his toil in the rain and sun, brought the rice out of the ground in slow stages, due to his ploughing, sowing, manuring and weeding. He had made a covenant with the weather gods before, during and after planting the crop.
Therefore, the reverence and the reference to Laxmi. For the policy makers and city dwellers, their rice comes from a packet on a rack in the local supermarket. They are not touched by the vagaries of the weather or a truant monsoon. Their callousness comes from this disconnect with nature and its forces.
The Food Corporation of India will happily procure 60 million tons of grain when there is a bumper crop. They know very well that they only have secure storage facilities for 45 million tons. This 45 MT storage includes relatively insecure storages like roof and plinth storage. We hardly have any vacuum silo storages.
In fact, our whole production, storage, and transportation infrastructure for grains are arranged back to front partly because of history and partly because of the cussedness and corruption of our policy makers. The middle class keeps quiet because they are beneficiaries of this totally corrupt and distorted distribution system.
Oldies like me remember the horrific food shortages of the 1950s and the 1960s. Famine was avoided because of America’s Public Law 480. Over the years, thousands of ships brought American wheat to Indian shores. This grain was quickly and efficiently sent to the hinterland and drought affected areas in what would then pass off as a real time operation. It was literally a ship to mouth existence. Huge storages were created at the ports for balancing the distribution and avoiding a logistical nightmare for the exporter-importer nexus.
Then in truly toynbeesque fashion we responded to this challenge of perennial food shortages. We discovered M S Swaminathan who brought in the green revolution. Food-grain production kept on increasing but we did not bother to create sufficient storages at the farms. So we sacrificed the food security of the farmers and peasants by using the existing infrastructure. The storages were at the ports and cities. Good for city-dwellers and exporters. But not so secure for the growers. As domestic production increased, the situation got worse. This forced us to export grain at a loss and starved our very own poor.
Worst of all, this was not the result of stupidity or ignorance or negligence. It was the result of a well thought out long term scam/fraud. So, year after year, we had food inspectors declaring grains ‘unfit for human consumption’. This is the first step of the fraud. It is when the Jackals and the Hyenas move in for the kill.
First we get the exporters who happily export the best of the grain, fictitiously labelled unfit for human consumption, to Europe to feed their cattle. These cattle are 10 times more food secure than the 800 million poor of this country. European meat and milk producers benefit from our loss. Then our local dairy farmers grab the grain for producing their milk and value added products like butter, ghee, cheese.
Next in line come our poultry farmers who use the lesser grain to feed their chickens to produce eggs and table birds. Each time these things happen, the poor of this country have to tighten their belts. They pay for it with their loss of nutrition, health and even their lives. No wonder we have so much of rural/peasant distress/suicide among farmers.
For extreme cynicism how about saying that farmer suicides are helping women empowerment since their widows take on the added responsibilities of the family.
Lastly come the real rascals with their godfather’s blessings from Baramati. They can take the worst of the ‘not for human consumption’ grain and turn it into alcohol. If you can’t change the world, you can get drunk and change your mind to accept the world and its rot. The badly spoilt grain gets ploughed back into the soil as manure/humus.
This ‘achievement’ is only possible if we allow grains to rot. Along the way of course, some of it is consumed by all kinds of vermin. Rats, monkeys, crows, and mice have a field day. So often we see the poor trying to salvage grain by separating it from rodent droppings, worms, fungus. This is the kind of high growth, the ‘India shining’ that we are building on the living corpses of hundreds of millions of millions of poor Indians. It’s like starving the horse on whose back you are riding.
This is what you get when you have PMs and planners who are ex World Bank classical economists. The ones we have, belong to the Economic school called the Chicago Mafia with people like Milton Freidman as their founder and ultimate reality. What else can you expect from someone who says that ‘The profit motive is the soul of economics’?
Economics never had a soul because people never mattered. Even when reduced to labour, they ranked long after capital, land and information. This lesson I learned in Economics 101.
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Humour and Intelligence
By Smitha Bhandare Kamat
Life without a dash of humour would be total claptrap. With our mounting woes and worries pulling us down everyday, a few laughs add the much required spice. Indeed, the unexpected problems and challenges in life would undoubtedly become unbearable but for this gift that holds things together when everything else is falling apart.
This skill can very well be developed like any other; all it takes is a little effort, change of perception and application of one’s intelligence.
Linguistic intelligence can be enhanced by puns, satires, anecdotes, and not to forget, the ‘verbal punctuations’, in the form of pregnant pauses, loud mouthed exclamations, incredible question marks etc., while mathematical intelligence according to Mark Wahl, author of the ‘Mathematical Mystery Tour’, states that humourous stories grip the attention, and motivate previously fearful students to work more confidently towards understanding the subject of Maths.
Well, being an ex-student in this subject, what was more captivating was competing figures, vital statistics, the reduction and seduction of variables, the union and intersections … Well, the maths class never did sound more interesting. Visual –Spatial intelligence can be enhanced by cartoons, witty posters and, illustrations and funny pictures, provided you are not the character involved.
Kinesesthetic intelligence is concerned with bodies, and the moulding of the same, creating an ‘action’ sentence, funny contact and speaking volumes with the blessed body.
Call it body language, or non verbal communication. Musical intelligence can best be improvised with musical puns, such as those by the noted composer P D Q Bach, and help to sharpen the listening skills and improve concentration. Limericks, funny rhymes add to the laughter lines.
Interpersonal intelligence has become a priority, and indispensable, in today’s world. Spontaneous response, witty remarks, amusing revelation and cracks makes the smile linger on the lips of many for quite some time. And last, but definetly not in the least, is the intrapersonal intelligence. All it takes is the ability to laugh at one’s own foibles or mistakes. Rather than wallow in self depreciation, shame and anger, better to admit it is a honest mistake and move on.
Well guys, like I was telling this middle is a big mistake, lets quickly finish with it and explore the next fib, for the next week.
