India had a glorious past. A walk through our heritage sites, temples,
forts will evidence that. The rich literary heritage, classical, colloquial
also indicate the freedom the society had, how it executed its freedom with
much grace & responsibility. India’s geography, its valleys, forests, the
Himalayas, the Vindhyas, the Sahyadris, the Nilgiris are unique for such a
large country. These give raise to mineral rich perineal & seasonal rivers.
The population is generously developed with so much rich fertility of the land.
And it also coexisted with equally thick animal and plant population. The bio
diversity of India is one of the best and unique in the world.
With so much natural richness India today is stooped in poverty. Rural
migration to urban areas is steadily increasing. More than half the population
is living in unhygienic conditions. The child deaths due to malnutrition,
diarrhea, malaria, cholera are indications of our poverty. Even the child
trade, child labor is rampant despite legislations against it. These are not
one off incidents rather regularly occurring that it is no longer news items
for new papers. That means it is systemic in nature. Even if it is one off
incidents in some good states & areas the root cause is the systemic
failure and not by fluke.
That means with so much rich geological diversity for life to thrive
have we created a system of failure for a large population? Is this poverty due
to nature fury or is it all man made? Has all that rich biodiversity been
privatized by the rich? Or is it all polluted? Has it all become unhygienic,
unlivable? Why are the rural population driven to cities to live in slums?
The answer lies in the Large Versus the Small. In the glorious past,
India had a large number of smaller kingdoms. They were completely self-reliant
and independent. The population was well spread across the geography in
villages. And these villages were also almost completely self-reliant and self-governed.
The basic needs of food, water, shelter & clothing was taken care of by the
population of a single village however small it was. All of them hard worked
for their living & still had time to create great assets for India in the
form of literature, art, sculpture, artecrafts, great monuments etc., They
stand tall even today in a large number of villages across India.
But modern civilization assets have a life of not more than 100 years.
Be it any factory, city sky scrapers, large dams, fast moving cars, high flying
Airplanes. Factories will last as long as they can suck the raw materials
around. Cars and Airplanes ply for not more than a decade or 2. Every cement
building, edifice, dams have its life. And they all serve only the rich and few
medium classes. For the poor nothing of these luxuries is available. The rulers
of the country argue and believe deeply that these are the harbinger of
progress, wealth, upliftment of the downtrodden. And they are able to sell that
dream to all people very well. The learned people, middleclass like us also
believe that this is indeed the Holy Grail. The poor and the downtrodden aspire
for it.
The funniest argument is that these will provide the daily bread, clean
water, and clothing for all across India. But the hard truth is that, exactly
these modern luxuries are the reason and root cause of pushing India into
poverty.
But where lies the answer? The answer lies in Gram Swarajya. Every
grama has to become swavalambi (self-reliant). Today the government is in the
business of promising distribution of grains & water to all. The government
should GIVE less and enable people to produce & live by themselves. Government
should only protect their harmonious living. But government today snatches
their land & water to promise them to give them clean water and food. What
an irony.
Public Distribution System (PDS): Concentration of Grains for distribution to the poor
The PDS aims to serve entire India. This is one very very large system.
The Punjab wheat has to come to Karnataka Villages, Andhra rice needs to go to
Rajasthan villages. So it is a very complex mesh of procurement,
transportation, storage & distribution of grains across India. There are a
dozen central departments and a dozen state departments involved in this entire
complex system. The government itself admits to about 25% pilferage in this
system.
Almost none of the quality grains reach the final intended beneficiary.
The best quality will be replaced by the rejected worst quality on the way. At
many stages they get into private mills, malls, and food processing units,
industries at pittance managed by the mighty and powerful. The intended grain
for the poor finally ends up in McDonalds burgers or Star hotel plates.
PDS also pushes for large production of same thing in an area. That is
called mono culture. That is if Punjab is rich in wheat production, the
government procures only wheat from small farmers & nothing else. So in
desire of money they grow only one grain. But for healthy living they need
multi grain. So government says I’ll give through PDS procured from elsewhere.
The earth also becomes weak with mono culture. The farmer also becomes slave of
government procurement of his produce as well as consumer of what government
gives. Independence fully lost.
Large land Farming Vs Small land farming
While this is happening in the distribution system, what happens to the
society of producers & beneficiaries? Are they getting rich? Not really.
The farmers suicide is an indicator. The father of Green Revolution for India M
Swaminathan now advocates Small Land holding, Family Farming, multi crop
farming, organic farming in this paper: http://www.currentscience.ac.in/Volumes/107/12/1970.pdf
The green revolution was launched to curb world hunger. He got
recognized and rewarded for his great research enabling the rice & wheat
revolution in India during 80’s. Now he is shunning his own propositions. Within
his life time he realized that this had detrimental effect and increased
poverty and is not sustainable. So he has presented several papers to UN in
favour of small land holding and family farming which he says as ‘Ever Green
Revolution’. But is government listening and caring? They still push for
subsidies to chemical farming, factories, polluting air and river.
The chemical farming will lead small farmers into long term debts.
Debts will lead to suicide or giving up their land for big land lords. Then
become their slaves.
Big land lords want subsidies in chemical fertilizers and pesticides.
The chemical factories will lobby with the government for fast and high
productivity per acre through chemical farming. Politicians succumb to their
lobby money. Politicians are people leaders and they know very well the problem
and the solution. But still since they succumb to lobby money, they paint the
picture to small farmers to get loan, take subsidy, and assure them that their
government will protect them. So the vicious circle starts.
The education about organic farming is slowly but steadily growing. I
hope a day comes when people will vote out a politician who promises subsidies
and vote to power someone who gives them freedom from subsidies to chemical
farming. And hence leading to shut down of these chemical factories.
Large Dams: Concentration of large amount of water for distribution to Arid regions
Here again Government believes in Concentration of Water Wealth of
equity distribution to all. It is a myth. Whole lot of movements in India &
the world has happened against the large dams. In many cases government has
dropped the idea. But still in north east there are more than 100 large dams
sanctioned and in various stages of implementation even now. The UPA, NDA are
all same when it comes to adopting modern civilization of earth destruction and
humanity destruction for the benefit of few.
Typically a large dam submerges very large fertile land, usually forest
land. The benefit is for some 5 to 10 times larger area if properly executed in
the plains. So cost benefit looks good & stops on paper only. Beyond this
only problem, issues, destruction, arise.
Typically the dam construction is first step. But the benefit is
realized only after canals, sub canals, sub-sub canals are constructed reaching
every acre of the plains that is planned. But rarely that happens. Even in KRS,
in one of the ambitious overhead canal they left water recently first time
after its construction after so many decades. Funnily they immediately shut it
because of leakage. They never attempted to leave water again in that canal. So
many kilometers of cement canal, pillars are standing as mute reminder of our
failure. While on way to Mysore from Bangalore you can see that overhead canal
cross over the highway even today.
Recently, Deve Gowda our beloved former Prime minister was booked for
not implementing Benne Hole canal after a very large sum of money was
sanctioned and spent when he was PWD minister. But he successfully argued that
it was constructed and got out of it. How? Because the canal needs maintenance.
So he argued without maintenance mud swept over, bushes, grasses grew. So the
canal vanished.
The answer lies again in small tanks construction and maintenance. The
ancient system of linked tank (Kere, Kunte, Yeri, Pushkarani, etc.,) system
brings up the water table. All the districts in India had linked tank system.
Even in the arid plains there used to be tanks. A tank typically used to be
life line for surrounding 3-4 villages. And 4-5 linked tanks used to irrigate
all agriculture done by those 15-20 villagers. Some of the old & famous
surviving tanks have some inscriptions of that day’s king or paleygar who
commissioned it. For example, Chitradurga’s Chandravalli tank has Mayura Varma
of Kadamba’s inscriptions. That means it served several generations life for almost
1500 years now. Can you compare it with our Benne Hole example!?!
Large Conglomerates: Reducing jobs, eliminating large number of small players; eliminating competition; reducing quality
During last UPA regime due to the concerted efforts of the
opposition they shot down the FDI in retail. It is a good thing. We are already
under so much poverty by embracing modern ways of things. To top it if we bring
in foreign investment also they’ll release us only after sucking out all blood.
British rule already taught us before. But we don’t seem to learn from bad
experience of recent past nor from good example of ancient times.
Large conglomerates are entering simple retail industry. The
large conglomerates will have the financial muscle to arm twist the government
and banks to sanction large loans. Then they ensure the direct farm to shop
delivery of farm products. This will give raise to large farming, contract
farming & eliminate small farmers or make them slaves. Then in the
procurement & transportation, there a number of small business owners who
get eliminated. Then in the distribution it will eliminate the stockists and
the small shop owners. The small petty shop owners will be generally all family
members involved. And all of them will need to find new jobs or get enslaved.
So in this entire process, the job loss will be more than 50% of the jobs originally
held. The consumer hopes to get the benefit of those channels removed. But do
you really see that? All the profit get pocketed handsomely by the corporate
but still show losses in the books somehow for tax avoidance. So government
also looses by tax collection at various stages by the small businesses.
So the net effect is whole lot of job loss and hence
increasing poverty; Increasing wealth of the wealthy creating a greater divide
between the rich and the poor; the government loses tax revenue.
Final Conclusion
So through these examples, it is clear that Small land
farming, Small tanks, Small businesses create harmony, independence & interdependence,
fosters innovation, sustenance for generations, quality. Most importantly it
creates wealth, job sustenance, it eliminates poverty. It creates freedom to
live. After all that’s what our forefathers fought freedom for. Why do we give it away to another set of
goons?
