Skip to main content

Farmers dont want to farm?

The whole lame and twisted logic to now defend the fundamentally undemocratic process of snatching farmers' land without their consent and without a social impact assessment is to say that a majority of respondents in a CSDS survey would rather not farm under the current conditions.


Instead of exploiting this telling piece of data for serving corporate interest, the Govt could have asked the following questions to try and address the real issues at hand
1- Would the farmers have said that they would continue to farm if their produce got a fair price?
2- Would the farmers have said they would continue to farm if they had better access to irrigation, electricity and technology?
3- Would those farmers who want to leave farming despite the provision of these conditions, want to retain their land as assets? Or would they be happy to have their land snatched away in the name of the greater good (an undefined, unquantified phrase) of the country?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gaza numbers

 Escape  Escape to where the mind does not count  To when a smile is in tune  To where mixing is matching  And forest sounds talk to river gurgles And numbers fade and flow and fly.   

Leaving Home - a documentary on the Delhi based band, Indian Ocean

Its the story of 4 people who got together and did what people do when they truly 'get together' - they transform, they surmount, they deepen the depths and they find without setting out to discover, they sway dangerously knowing there is somewhere to lean and they risk for magic, they make reaching somehwere seem like a waste of time coz they constantly kick up their goalposts, they remain manic and mysterious till they come together and feed off each other's hungry creative souls and finally, together, they make sterling music.  I watched this documentary film last week at the premeir of its theater release. Its a rare one, not to be missed, by those who like music and films and those who want to watch a slice of contempoary indian life. This documnetary is showing in theaters in several cities in India and in New York.  Watch whether or not you know Indian Ocean or their music; coz you will most certainly find yrself and yr yearnings in the film; watch the film c...
  A Critique of Randomised Control Trials in Poverty Alleviation Last week, Michael Kremer, Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo received the Nobel for Economics for "their experimental approach to alleviating global poverty” and for addressing “smaller, more manageable questions,” rather than big ideas. This experimental approach is based on so called Radomised Control Trials. Simply put, in such experiments, a randomly selected group of individuals (randomization is a method of removing bias) receive an intervention whose efficacy is being tested. Changes that result in the conditions of this random experiment group is compared with those in another ‘similar’ group of individuals (referred to as a ‘control group’) that was not provided the intervention. The difference in outcomes is directly attributed to the intervention. The RCT as a scientific research method is primarily widely practiced in clinical research to test the efficacy and safety of new pharmaceutical products/tr...