Aug
23
There is no other media support as well.
Our TV channels are still entertainment oriented!
The Indian agriculture is supposed to be the largest economic and social sector. This much is admitted and appreciated.
But there is no real appreciation as there are no bodies where the farmers representatives or spokespersons are prominently allowed or accommodated.
Take even Sonia Gandhi’s high profile National Advisory Council (NAC).
Who are all the representatives of the farmers and rural India?
Without taking on names we can say most of them are urban professionals, they live in cities and they do things that are of course nationally important but they don’t seem to have the pulse of the farmers in their thinking and actions.
To talk of agriculture only in grad rhetoric is not agricultural reforms, is it?
Also, simply you fight for the workers, then, you become an expert on rural India’s transformation.
Either you be a landowner or be villagers, live in actual village for most of the time, then, you can at least breather the rural air. Yes, such persons might not find it comfortable to sit with the Delhi-based activists and retired bureaucrats.
Please retired bureaucrats, please avoid.
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Aug
23
Obama comes to India with a heavy mind!
Filed Under Economics | Leave a Comment
US unemployment unrelenting! Obama is obsessed with Bangalore’s competition to American jobs!
Our government tries to prove more loyal than the king!
The civil nuclear liability bill to be passed with so many doubts uncleared! Will the Indian people trust Prime Minister’s many promises to the previous US government?
Obama is an intelligent man! He knows India is a soft target. India wants to have the best of both worlds! Have the nuclear equipment imports without signing the NPT or the CtBT.
And what promises Manmohan Singh has given, you know?
Our Prime Minister neither talks nor takes Parliament into confidence. Says experts and even sections of the elite Manmohan’s assurance to US government and the nuclear equipment suppliers will haunt the government and the Indian people for long.
Certainly, this is not the last word on our civil nuclear liability bill.
The Indo-US civil nuclear deal is at a particular stage when the US President Barack Obama is about to visit India in November and when India is having many other troubles with the USA under Obama’s leadership right now.
First, the US economy itself is not in good shape. Obama’s leadership itself has raised mixed reactions in the US and in the US media. The US President, the American media says is facing a fading popularity.
This is troubling, it seems, the US President at the moment. Yes, he had faced immense problems since his election. US economy went into recession, it is a historic events and the US economy is still faltering.
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Aug
18
So, agriculture is now a game?
Filed Under Agriculture | 1 Comment
Who is playing whose game?
Agriculture is for the farmers? Or for the starving poor?
Or, for the election-eyed street-smart politicians?
The Prime Minister and the Agriculture Minister nowhere in this game?
Supreme Court pulls up the Central government!
Sonia Gandhi-led National Advisory Council and the experts and media stars would battle it out?
Yes, lakhs of tonnes of grains is rotting in the open yards in Haryana and Punjab and perhaps in the UP too. The Supreme Court, more than once, as we write is almost shouting at the Central government: please distribute to the millions of poor who go hungry. But there is no action, it seems.
Or, where is the Prime Minister or the Agriculture Minister who must be making some open statement as to what is being done?
Why there is no news. No newspaper worth its salt thinks fit to highlight these rotting grains and the starving poor.
But the experts, M.S.Swaminathan and P.Sainath, both close to The Hindu newspaper are having a field days, it seems!
Both are occupying precious editorial space ,almost every other day and holding forth on their superior wisdom as to how to save the farmers, save the Indian agriculture and also in the process save their superiors, employers or their bosses, as it were.
After all, in India you need a boss or an employer, it could be anybody, the very government or governments or the newspaper owners or even the foreign funder. Then only in India you can survive as an expert and as an advice giver. Sainath almost screams and dramatises the issue or issues (August 12, 2010).
Sainath says in a more nosy rhetoric:”The nation has spawned 49 dollar billionaires and about 100,000 dollar millionaires in a decade. But it has no money to feed its hungry .So says a government hat tosses 500,000 crores of tax exemptions to the wealthy, the corporate bosses (who have funded the party and parties in the last elections) and also done much more timely service to prop up the UPA-II now in the saddle).In the current budget just under three heads, says Sainath, these tax exemptions are given.
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