Rythu Bazaar

I hold the concept of "Rythu Bazaars" in high esteem. The presence of these even today after Chadrababu's regime (it is one of the good schemes implemented by the TDP government led by N. Chandrababu Naidu) shows the success of the scheme. What it did was to allow the farmers to directly sell their produce in the urban markets bypassing the network of distributors/resellers/brokers. This helped both the producers and consumers as the consumers could get it for lesser than they usually paid, and the producers could get more money for their produce than they used to get from the brokers. For this he even arranged transportation (APSRTC Buses, the state-run public transport system). I am not sure if even today they are in-place. Of course it is only limited to those areas which are closer to urban markets but still it is effective for that sector.

Agriculture a profession?

Is just agriculture enough to provide for a comfortable living?

Was wondering if agriculture can be taken up as a full-time profession. Leave aside the money that can be earned. Assuming we are looking at 1 acre of land. Looking at the amount of effort/time that it requires, it doesn't seem like it can be a full-time profession. You have short peaks where the work is there (like tilling, sowing and harvesting) and the rest all is slack time. At most maybe a couple of hours a week for inspection, irrigation, weeding etc. So obviously human productivity will be very less if this is the sole occupation. (place the economics here) Compare this with the amount of time people are expected to put in other professions. 8 hours a day and 6 days a week (barring a few professions which have 5-day weeks). With this a person can earn around 6k rupees per month which amounts to 72k rupees a year. What I intend to convey is that we could think of doing other things apart from agriculture and increase human productivity. People were used to making cultivation as the only occupation in the earlier days because, that was the only thing you could do, or you had very limited options then, but now the gamut of oppurtunities has increased considerably. I dont say it is not being done...there are people who do cultivation and also do agricultural labour for others. But I am hinting at the state/govt providing for such a flexibility where you can have two or more occupations. Of course this seems to be a bad idea in the current situation when there is a large chunk of population which is totally unemployed.

• how much land is required?
• size of the family?
• no. of hours spent?
• yearly income?
• money invested?
• limit on the productivity

RISC

Came across this paper called RISC by Atanu Dey and Vinod Khosla. These are my initial opinions (haven't given much thought and also I dont think I am sufficiently equipped w.r.t to understand it deeply and it's consequences).
What it proposes:-

• To develop the rural population the rural area should be transformed into a collection of cities some 5000 of them called RISC centers.
• Instead of providing all the infrastructure and services to every village provide them at these RISC centers as this is only economically viable. the cost or providing the services will be less because the services are being offered to a large no. of people (each RISC center caters to around 100 villages, which means around 1,00,000 people)
  

According to it these are going to be results:-

• stop the rural-to-urban migration (due to creation of employment oppurtunities and availability of the services that are now available only in the urban area.)
• increase in per-capita income of the rural people
  
• all this happens at a lesser cost and it is a catalytic cycle, which will continue once started.
  

It seems very convincing, but my only worry at present is that the rural landscape will get polluted because of this urbanization.

Date (24/07/2006)

The Big Divide

"Urban India where the Infromation Technology revolution is taking place, from where the upwardly mobile middle class is located and from where it seeks to zoom into trajectories of two-digit growth, where foreign direct investment is invited and feted, that urban India is where money makes money. Rural India, where a failed monsoon leading to a failed crop means disaster. And a good monsoon leading to a bumper crop can also mean disaster for the farmer who will have to sell for less, where the systems of institutional credit have weakened, spawning informal and vicious private money lending, where hundreds of farmers have swallowed the pesticide they have borrowed to buy, that rural India is concerned with the money that is not made. At least by those who need it."
This is an extract from "The Hindu" dated 03 March 2006. With this I start this blog, a place for my views on the country side of this country, also my first step towards fulfilling my dream.