If it is the very first day of the new year, and you get a chance to listen to a Ph.D. viva voce, it can indeed be a very happy feel, right? Luckily, the BMCC Research Center provided me with such an opportunity this morning. I could attend online the viva of Dr. Lanjekar Sir's research student.
For me, listening to it was yet another lesson in rural distress. The study related to 2014-15 to 2019-20. It detailed the usual sad story which P. Sainath, the noted "Hindu" columnist and the author of a much acclaimed book entitled "Everybody Loves a Good Drought" has repeatedly brought to the notice of every sensitive soul.
Hence even in Galande Sir's presentation, all the usual suspects, poverty, structural inequities, caste discrimination and farmer suicides, were all present.
I would have liked to open up a deeply connected but slightly different scope/area. The most obvious fall-out of the terrible rural distress is the huge internal migration. To Pune daily in droves come such rural labourers or even farmers with marginal land-holding.
Honestly, passing by Swargate, my unavoidable bus-stop, is a vista etched in deep tragedy where, by the roadside, live families who are yet to be absorbed in to the umpteen dingy zopadpatties/slums surrounding the Parvati, now almost a hillock, for instance.
It is easy to talk en passim about the fast pace of urbanisation. These migrant families, who make the faceless majority of the urban swell, how do they exist, especially when they also have to bear the expenses of the aged left behind in the company of the bare barren lands?
Mostly, they take up gig jobs. They are the backbone of the gig economy which began as a fall-out of the post-LPG era, and flourished like the weed in a farm in the post-Covid era. I would have liked to discuss how this gig economy has affected not merely the rural lower income group, but by extension the rural distress as well.
When the head of a family leads a hand by mouth existence in a city, given the gig economy, how does he, can he at all, support the family back at home? In other words, rural distress flows in to urban disaster, and urban poverty feeds in to rural tragedy, and this vicious circle, running almost in a loop, refused to subside.
A rice plantation farmer, who drives an auto in Pune, was once sharing his terrible tragedy. I had to travel in his auto because it suddenly started pouring. It was early October. So in his acre or two of a farm, the crop was ready, to be cut before Diwali. With the sudden showers, the ready grains would rot, could not be dried and stored as they thus start to germinate! He told me the same sad story of the previous two years, too!
He was driving the auto-rickshaw as a driver, not as the owner. In a way, it, too, was a variant of the gig economy which now is operational at all levels, almost to mid- management, and in many professions, including teaching!
What could be the solutions? I had suggested collective or community farming and vertical farming alias hydroponics as well as alternative crops more amenable to excessive rain. People have come up with the idea of the corporatising of the farming industry, which could be debated. Such solutions might help rural farm distress.
As the Indian economy itself is even today more of the unorganised sector variety, what happens to the workers caught in the jaws of the gig economy in most big cities and metros? What about the total lack of any safety nets or social welfare network for them? Aplenty are the questions, answers amiss right now, but hopefully emerging!
Pratima@Yes, across the world, given the climate imbalance, all these issues, rural farm distress, internal migration, city gidh workers are dominant. May be, we can learn frm those solutions as well.
Quote of the day: "Out of difficulties," argues Jean de la Bruyère, "grow miracles."
Word if the day: hydroponics. Hydroponics is a method of growing plants without soil, using mineral nutrient solutions in a water solvent, often with an inert medium (like perlite or coco coir) for root support, enabling faster growth, less water use, and higher yields in small or controlled spaces, suitable for herbs, greens, and vegetables year-round.
Let us learn grammar: As we have already learnt to use the indefinite article "a" (it goes with a common, countable, singular noun used for the first time), let us now look at how to use "an". "An", too, is used with a common, countable, singular noun. This noun, however, has a vowel sound word initially. Let me give you "an example". "A university" often has "an hour" long lecture.
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