Improving Agriculture

There can be certain minor changes done in agriculture, which can result in a significant amount of increase in the earnings of the farmers. Some of these could be :-

• Cultivation of pulses instead of paddy
• Switching to horticulture instead
  

Lost Opportunities...Unrealized Potential

70% of India lives in Villages.

Right from my schooldays I have been hearing of this statistic. I am not sure how true it is. It would be certainly more than 10 years since I first came across it and shouldn't the number show some change, considering that there has been a lot of migration from the villages to the cities during this time. I don't understand where these statistics come from. But that's not the topic of this post.
Let's put the number at 60%. That means 3/5th of the Indian Population is not being provided the opportunities to realize their potential. Can you imagine what would have been the result if these neglected people were also given the education/health facilities on par with what their counterparts in the urban India enjoy? Wouldn't we have been the biggest economic power in the world.
Let's not delay it any further. They say: "Better late than Never".

PRADAN

Today while going through my daily news feeds from Google on Rural Development, came across this article from The Hindu which highlighted the work being done by this Non-Profit Organization called PRADAN (PRofessional Assistance for Development ActioN).

Established in Delhi in 1983, PRADAN was pioneered by a group of young professionals, all of whom were inspired by the conviction that individuals with knowledge resources and empathy for the marginalised must work with communities at the grassroots in order to help them overcome poverty.

I too believe that until some of the educated/knowledgeable people move to the villages to assist the developmental process, not much can be achieved, despite the various Government/Non-Government Development-related Initiatives. It caught my attention and was forced to study the work being done by PRADAN towards holistic development. Some of the things that I liked about PRADAN are:-

• The involvement of motivated educated youth as executives to carry on their developmental projects
• Mobilization of funds from Government-created development schemes like National Food for Work Programme (NFFWP), Rastriya Sam Vikas Yojana (RSVY) and other district level projects being run by Integrated Tribal Development Agency (ITDAs)
• Focus on improving Agricultural productivity, Microenterprise promotion etc. all of which aim at generating wealth.
• To date, it has reached over 1.1 lakh rural households. That's indeed an achievement.
  

It has a 1-year apprenticeship program which is the training ground for people who want to get directly involved into developmental projects at grassroots level.

Online Railway Reservation Service

The last time I went home, I felt the need for this. I had to accompany my uncle to the Satellite Railway Reservation Office in Aamadaalavalasa, to book the tickets for my uncle and his family. The place is around 30 km from my village, so we had to travel all the way and end up standing in a queue. After 1 hr of waiting the guy closed the counter for lunch. We came back after lunch only to find the "Link Failed" board at the counter. Luckily after waiting for some time the link was restored and we finally got our work done.

If we had some internet-cafe in the nearby town with a good/reliable internet connection, we could have used the IRCTC (Indian Railway Catering and Tourism Cororation Ltd.) website to reserve the tickets online. This could have saved us time and money. Isn't this a good business idea? Perhaps somebody can provide this Service through his internet-cafe at a premium. The precursor is a good and reliable internet connectivity. I see that there are a handful of internet cafe's in the nearby town, but the connection is quite slow and also unreliable. But there was a significant improvement from the time when I had used it a year ago. Hopefully within the next year things improve in this direction either because of state-owned ISPs (Internet Service Providers) like BSNL or other private ISPs. One thing that comes to the mind is that if there was tremendous improvement in the Cellular connectivity over there (Consider the fact that it has been more than a year since Cellular Service Providers like BSNL, Reliance, Airtel and Hutch have started their operations there) , why is that the Internet Connectivity not improving? It's simple : No big Demand for it. The other thing to note is that even Satellite-based TV like Tata-Sky is also becoming popular over there within very short time of it's introduction.

SEZ's Proving their Worth

Read this article about the Apache SEZ (Special Economic Zone) in Tada, Nellore. It's yet another story proving that setting up small/medium scale industry is the way towards rural development. It talks about the increasing incomes that unskilled/semi-skilled people around the region are getting because of being employed in this Sports Shoe manufacturing unit (Interesting to note is that the shoe's that are made here are sold under the "Adidas" brand). A salary of Rs 3500 a month in the villages is not less. This is also stopping the urban migration to some extent. It seems that the workers over here have also stated buying motor-cycles. That's an indication of improved lifestyle.

Reverse Diaspora

One means of generating wealth in the Rural Areas is to make it easy for the Software Engineers to be able to work from Villages. As these people have relatively high income at their disposal, they will spend more and this will in-turn create more opportunities.

Why would the SE's move to Rural Areas:-

• Existing Cities are unable to handle the increasing population and they have become overcrowded
• Enormous Pollution
• Increased Traffic and Congestion
• Steep increase in Prices
  
• Increased Rental and Property prices
  

What Infrastructural facilities need to be provided:-

• Power
• Internet Connectivity (Telecommunications is already there)
  
• Proper Roads and Transportation
• Health Services
• Proper Education Facilities so that the children of these people can have good
  

Advantages:-

• Little or no Pollution in the Villages and Peaceful atmosphere
• With this kind of Diaspora Cities will be eased
• The higher disposable income of these people will increase the wealth of other people involved in the rural economy like shopkeepers etc.
  
• This wealthy class will demand better services like hospitals/education etc. and which would automatically improve the status of these services in the villages. Ofcourse these services might not be available to the existing people with low incomes
  
• Working from home will reduce the Energy consumed for Transportation
• Total cost of owning a house (including the price of the land and construction) is quite less in villages and if more people are constructing houses then there is another market (construction market and demand for labour) getting created here.
  

Disadvantages:-

Rural Economic Development

Some ideas for rural economic development:-

• Agriculture
  
• Industries (Small and Large Scale)
  
• Food Processing
• Tourism

The Govt. is pumping in money through various developmental schemes likes Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, Free Housing etc. but most of these are not sustainable. Instead of basing the schemes on wealth generation, it is spending wealth on these short-sighted schemes. Urbanizing the villages/towns is a promising concept and slowly it seems the political leaders are also getting to understand it. I have been hearing of the honourable Ex-President APJ Abdul Kalam trying his best to spread the word about PURA (Providing Urban amenities in Rural Areas).

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.