i just read that congress is pretty skeptic about tom-tomming the booming economy and record growth rates for the fear that it may back-fire ( remember BJP's india shining campaign... ) to be frank there are reasons for the skepticism.. after sixteen years of above six percent growth.. there is a feeling that the agrarian sector is down in dumps... i have a feeling that this sector is below what it was when liberalization started... since '91 the share of industry & services have leaped while agriculture's share has plummeted.. though the people employed have remained same or maybe increased considering that rural areas have higher population growth rates... so the cake has got much bigger.. but of the farmers the per-unit cake is more or less same... never before in modern india has one seen such rural suicides or such ever widening chasm in income levels between rural and urban india... the way i see it... no roads/phones/water/electricity in rural india is just due to the plain fact that rural sector is not lucrative enough so that they can be targeted.. maybe some socialist can ask, should only lucrative things be done... to be fair to private economy.. you are in there as long as you are able to make money out of it... the main question is why agriculture pays so less... where did the reformers went wrong w.r.t agriculture... the answer lies with the sector itself... our agriculture still lies in the shadows of PL-480, of green revolution, of wheat/rice/sugarcane, of some nehruvian utopic dream... whereas the reality is decided in electronic commodity exchanges or the rain god... everybody knows that growing wheat/rice on a five-ten hectare land over & over again just manifests itself in law of diminishing returns... leave that to big farmers who can use scale as efficiency.. or leave it to huge farmlands of US/Canada... instead focus on the niche.. like horticulture,vegetables, oilseeds,spices and pulses and maybe mushroom or plantation... the scale of the holdings ( generally very small... ) is another big problem... how can one get use the advantages of scale & efficiency... something on the lines of amul would be worth trying.. maybe a corporative framework... ( its not a throwback to mao's commune based... but very much on the same lines... but a corporate player being involved to drive the much needed efficiency... ) developed countries are subsidizing farm sector despite of WTO while we are doing nothing to mend this sector of its ills... maybe the corporate model is something that can succeed... maybe... and what's the harm in trying... you can't fall back more then where we are today... those 700 million souls deserve their place in the india shining...
~ Mr Tambourine Man~
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