Tamil Nadu showed the biggest increase of all States, going from 512 in 2008 to 1060 in 2009. Karnataka clocked in second with a rise of 545. And Andhra Pradesh saw the third biggest rise — 309 more than in 2008.this is not to be interpreted as a parochial view, but from a social angle, the southern states have been at the forefront and these trends are indicative of a deeper malaise, which is, as the final statement in the article - “The latest data show us that the agrarian crisis has not relented, not gone away.” The policies driving it have also not gone away."
In 1963, the government of Maharashtra ended famine forever in the State. It did this without adding a morsel to anyone's diet. It did so simply by passing an Act in the Legislature that deleted the word ‘famine' from all laws of the State. No kidding. This was called ‘The Maharashtra Deletion Of The Term “Famine” Act, 1963” (And was dug up after decades by an independent researcher from Bangalore.)what to do with the excess grain rotting in the warehouses?
Meanwhile, say the ‘experts,' the millions of tonnes of grain rotting in open yards present a “golden opportunity” for India to export this in bulk “and seize on the high prevailing global prices of grain.” That is also what the government hopes to do. Its affidavit in response to a slap from the Supreme Court speaks of liquidating the excess stocks by open market sale (read exports).and what are the solutions to end food production shortfalls?
... we look around for ways to make up our production shortfall. Indian companies are buying land in parts of Africa to grow foodgrain. This finds approval with the Working Group on Agricultural Production set up by the Prime Minister and chaired by Haryana Chief Minister B.S. Hooda. Its report says “We should seriously consider these options for at least 2 million tonnes of pulses and 5 million tonnes of edible oil for 15-20 years.”this solution is quite imperialistic and needless to say, idiotic.
Will the courts say anything about the notion of shipping grain abroad when millions go hungry at home? Will the government say something other than ‘no' to the needs of the hungry? Will the NAC rethink its stand on a universal PDS? Will Parliament accept fraudulent definitions of food security? Will anyone speak for the Directive Principles of State Policy and how policy must work towards strengthening them? It would, of course, be silly to expect a government of this sensitivity to care a fig for the Directive Principles. But perhaps we can hope that the Supreme Court does?
This year alone, the budget gifts over Rs.500,000 crores in write-offs, direct and indirect, to the Big Boys. That's Rs.57 crores every single hour on average - almost a crore a minute. Beating last year's Rs.30 crores an hour by more than 70 per cent. (See Tables 5 and 12 of the "Statement of Revenue Foregone" section of the budget.)more money being funnelled into their pockets in t he guise of agricultural credit:
More and more of "agricultural" credit will go not to farmers but corporations. Indeed, "even External Commercial Borrowings will henceforth be available for cold storage or cold room facility." The budget even says: "Changes in the definition of infrastructure under the ECB policy are being made" to foster this process. Some of those changes have already happened. Several of the loans disbursed as "agricultural credit" are in excess of Rs. 10 crore and even Rs. 25 crore. And even as loans of this size steadily grew in number between 2000 and 2006, agricultural loans of less than Rs. 25,000 fell by more than half in the same period. (See Revival of Agricultural Credit in the 2000s: An Explanation. R. Ramakumar and Pallavi Chavan, EPW December 29, 2007.)post 1991, every finance minister has been sucking upto corporate india and now that India Inc is sinking its teeth into the agriculture sector, they continue to milk us dry.
Maharashtra has logged 41,404 farm suicides from 1997 (over a fifth of the national total) and 44,468 from 1995, the year when this State began recording farm data. No other State comes close. During 1997-2002, Maharashtra saw, on average, eight farmers kill themselves daily. The corresponding figure rose to 11 during 2003-2008. The rise was from an average of 2,833 farm suicides a year in the first period to an average of 4067 in the next period. more...guha writes another tribute to gandhi. his leadership creation skills was one his magnificent legacies for us to emulate.
One of Gandhi's less-noticed achievements was his making leaders of followers. Vallabhbhai Patel was given charge of building the Congress party; Jawaharlal Nehru of reaching out to the youth and to the West; C. Rajagopalachari with taking the nationalist message to south India; Maulana Abul Kalam Azad with taking this message to Muslims. The delegation of responsibility was also followed with regard to the constructive programme; thus J B Kripalani was asked to set up khadi centres, J C Kumarappa set to work on reviving the agrarian economy, Zakir Hussain was charged with designing an educational curriculum. In later years, the trust reposed in them by Gandhi helped these men make substantial contributions to the political and cultural life of the nation. more...TOI highlights the sorry state of higher education (engineering) in TN.
In an alarming indication of the turbulent state of affairs in Tamil Nadu's self-financing engineering colleges, it has emerged that more than 51,000 BE/B.Tech seats are lying vacant for want of students in the current academic year.
This figure is a significant and unparalleled 31% of the 1,65,980 seats, (including a few BArch seats), that were available in the 440 engineering colleges both under government and management quotas.
Latest admission statistics in engineering colleges compiled by officials of the higher education ministry revealed that only 1,14,518 seats were filled up during the admission season that started in July (government quota) and ended in October (management quota). more...
The price-rise-due-to-drought warning is a fraud. Of course, a drought and major crop failure will push up prices further. But prices were steadily rising for five years since the 2004 elections, long before a drought. Take the years between 2004 and 2008 when you had some good monsoons. And more than one year in which we claimed “record production” of foodgrain. The price of rice went up 46 per cent, of wheat by over 62 per cent, atta 55 per cent, salt 42 per cent and more. By March 2008, the average increase in the prices of such items was already well over 40 per cent. Then, they rose again till a little before the 2009 polls. And have risen dramatically in the past three months.taking on those who whined over the farm loan waiver on 2008...
Remember the great loan waiver of 2008, that historic write-off of the loans of indebted farmers? Recall the editorials whining about ‘fiscal imprudence?’ That was a one-time, one-off waiver covering countless millions of farmers and was claimed to touch Rs. 70,000 crore. But over Rs. 130,000 crore (in direct taxes) has been doled out in concessions in just two budgets to a tiny gaggle of merchants hogging at the public trough. Without a whimper of protest in the media. Imagine what budget giveaways to corporates since 1991 would total. We’d be talking trillions of rupees.
Simply put, the corporate world has grabbed concessions in just two years that total more than seven times the ‘fiscally imprudent’ farm loan waiver. In fact, it means that on average we have been feeding the corporate world close to Rs. 700 crore every day in those two years. Imagine calculating what this figure would be, in total, since 1991. (Er.., what’s the word for the bracket above ‘trillion?’) Ask for an expansion of the NREGS, seek universal access to the PDS, plead for more spending on public health and education — and there’s no money. Yet, there’s enough to give away nearly Rs. 30 crore an hour to the corporate world in concessions.and to his ardent critics who say that he does not offer solutions...
It could launch, among many other things, the pond-in-every-farm programme. It could restructure farm loan schedules. It could start getting the idea of monsoon management into its thinking. It could curb forward trading-linked speculation that was driving one of our worst price rises in history long before the drought was on the horizon. And it could declare universal access to the PDS. That cost could probably be easily covered by, say, cancelling the dessert from the menu of the unending corporate free lunch in this country.
... enhance livelihood security in rural areas by providing at least 100 days of guaranteed wage employment in a financial year to every household whose adultthe act now covers all areas of the country (except 100% urban districts).
members volunteer to do unskilled manual work.
Wages are to be paid according to the Minimum Wages Act 1948 for agriculturalother salient points are:
labourers in the State, unless the Centre notifies a wage rate which will not be less
than Rs. 60/ per day. Equal wages will be provided to both men and women.
Between 2000-04, banks wrote off over Rs. 44,000 crores. Mostly, this favoured a tiny number of wealthy people. One 'beneficiary' was a Ketan Parekh group company that saw Rs. 60 crore knocked off. (The Indian Express, May 12, 2005). However, those 'waivers' are done quietly. In 2004, last year of the NDA, such write-offs went up by 16 per cent. Such 'waivers' have not slowed down since 2004......read the entire article here.
a tiny Wall Street cabal which gave itself bonuses worth billions of dollars just weeks before the crash gets a bailout of Rs.1,19,520 crores. That's almost double the Rs.60,000 crores given to tens of millions of farmers in dire straits in this country....read the entire article here.
The day the Sensex crossed 19,000, India clocked in 94th in the Global Hunger Index — behind Ethiopia...That’s out of 118 countries...Pakistan ranks ahead of us, too, at 88. China logs in at 47. All our South Asian neighbours do better than us on this index, except Bangladesh.and here the classic sainath 'sarcatwistic'
None of the countries boasts an economy growing at 9 per cent a year.and when the mega sensex fall happened and froze trading for an hour
It took minutes for the top guns to swing into action. Fingers were in every dyke. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram lost no time in reassuring worried investors via the media...What stood out, of course, was the swiftness of both government and media response to each twitch in the index.
No Minister came forward to calm the nation when India hit the 94th rank in the Global Hunger Index...You’d think it was an issue worth some attention. But it was hard to find panels debating this on television. Or any editorials in the newspapers doing the same. No Ministers or top babus soothing the nerves of the hungry.and we top other dubious lists with aplomb
The United Nations’ Food & Agriculture Organisation in ... Its State of Food Insecurity in the World report confirmed yet again that we have the largest number of undernourished people in the globe.
The 2004 edition of the report had shown that India had added more people to the “newly hungry” in the planet than the rest of the world together. ...Between the years 1995-97 and 2000-02, hunger grew in India at a time when it fell in Ethiopia.and
Some 536,000 women died in childbirth in 2005. Of these, every fifth one of them, at least, was an Indian. That is, 117,000 of them.and why do things look likely to worsen
Health costs still mount. They push people into debt even faster than before. A study done for the WHO in six Indian States found that 16 per cent of households it looked at were pushed below the poverty line by heavy medical costs.and he comes down heavily on his family of media-folks
Our answer to this has been: more of the same. More privatisation. Less and less of a public health system.
In the world of the media, though, only one index matters: the Sensex. Watching which has spawned a whole little industry in itself. The numbers who pronounce on and debate it (in the media, anyway) are impressive. The oracles reading equity’s entrails for omens.note to readers
....he recalled how when the 2004 tsunami struck, the stock markets of five badly affected countries—India, Indonesia, Sri Lanka, Malaysia and Thailand—boomed.i found these archives on the sensex in december 2004. it is quite interesting to see the daily commentary towards the last week of the year.
Krishnamma is one of more than a lakh of women who have lost their husbands to
farm suicides across the country in the past 14 years.
