Wednesday, August 02, 2006
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.
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
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