Islands of Despair

Nick-H

You cannot wish away alienation if you deliberately allow parts of your state to fester and rot while a few islands flourish.

Rural misery has been written about and noted, exemplified by the continuing suicides of farmers in Vidarbha and Marathwada. The Bombay High Court has also, once again, warned the Maharashtra Government that it must do something about the high incidence of malnutrition among children between the ages of one and six. In the last three years, over 24,000 children have died of malnutrition.

The Full Article from The Hindu Here

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Nick-H

How the other half lives

Examples of imbalance between rural and urban areas can be seen all over Maharashtra where cities are growing disproportionately and often at the cost of the surrounding areas.

Also from The Hindu. Full article here

lotus blossom

when i was watching the documentary Panihari: Water Women of India i kept thinking about the disparity between these impovershed families and those who are living in affluence. the stark difference is quite disturbing, especially considering that so many children go to bed with nothing in their bellies. i think that a lot of it is justified away with "it's their karma", so why worry.

of late, i have been feeling overwhelmed by stories like these, wondering why so many people seem not to care. which makes me feel overwhelmed and energetically stuck. i'd like to be more action oriented, however.

nick, as someone who now lives in india, do you toy with ideas on possible solutions?

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Nick-H

Oh dear, I'm afraid not. I'm probably much less of an action person than you are

I'm afraid that the only people who can do anything about the situation are government.

In another thread I said something about this country needing a government that is interested in its huge, rural, poor majority rather than its techno-city rich few. Someone (Was it Merchant?) commented that his worst-case scenario was an uprising by the poor leading to civil war...

All this high-tech stuff is great, and I'm not at all against it, but I do feel that India should look after its own first. And if that means protectionism, saying no to imports, etc etc then that is what it should do.

It would be very unfair and very untrue to say that the Indian government does nothing for the rural poor. I'd like to see someone post who (unlike me) knows something about it, but I understand that there is fairly heavy subsidy, low-price or free electricity, tax-free profit on agriculture.

I have a pet idea. And that is that every farming community should be self-sufficient before it is allowed to sell anything. If every farm could feed its own family, at least there would be no malnutrition. It may be a stupid idea; it may be utterly impractical: I don't know enough about rural life to know. At least the tyrrany of the cash crop would then only threaten the bank account, not the stomachs of the farmers

...And i live in a nice comfortable corner of a nice comfortable city. My only worry is overspending my monthly budget, and at the moment, our overspend may be more than a rural family get to see.

lotus blossom

i rather like the idea. makes perfect sense to me! in Panihari, the women in the village were the proactive ones. many of their husbands were against them going to meetings to try and find solutions, but they were just trying to feed their starving children! they devised a great system where they would all pool their money together and then loan it to those who were most in need. i was in awe of how well their system seems to work.

Merchant

That rural self-sufficiency thing is the core component of socialism--collectivization of rural landholdings with workers all sharing the profits. Practicalities aside, the romantic ideal of the self-sufficient farmer has been part of the mythology of modern India. Unfortunately, it has never really work out, in the various ways it has been attempted.

The problems faced by the rural poor have to do with their utter lack of resources--water, fertilizer, communications, health care, education, capital--than with their inability to grow subsistence crops. And even if if they could merely subsist, who wants to be a serf?

The bottom line is that the rural poor need better access to hard and soft resources, not controls on how they deal with what they already have.

mira4bai4

The people that are really starving have lost their farms, these are the people that make up the slums; those that have left the farms due to crop failures, fighting and strife in the region and debts.

So while working on the principal of all farms should be self sufficient before any produce is sold has a few problems, one being the debt levels, so they sell the produce to try to pay the debts and go without food from that. Another major hurdle is the gov't making farmers reduce the size of their land by decree to encourage more land holders and therefore more votes but makes the small size of the farm uneconomic to run as a family unit as it will not feed the wider family working on it and those that form the family have to leave and try and find work in the cities. These become the slum dwellers. Interestingly the farms often have to make way for ever growing factories which then force more farmers off the land and acquire the land at minimal values that does not even cover the debt on the property.

The painful reality of this is taxes and using those taxes to create subsidised low tech business development units, not these grotty Godwins and cabins but enlisting the assistance of larger industrial units to mentor and train these people to become self sufficient in industry of various kinds. These places can be seen as apprenticeships for larger projects where the growth is able to be utilised to do various things at a local and community level as invariably it will turn into a community and community projects can rival those of the bigger industries if given the right opportunities. One could see certain community light industries making some components for say wind generators, another community making the structural components and then they are fitted together and bingo you have low cost wind turbines for the rural communities.

It is really not difficult to find a solution, there is the money, there are the mentors, there is the resources in the form of labour and there is both the desire and the need to do something by these people. After all they came to the cities to find a better life and what they ended up with is a snake pit in the sewers of hell.