Rogue elephants in the backyard
A study explains why peaceful pachyderms go on rampages that leave crops and humans devastated
News
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Government attention sets pulses spinning
Pulse production in India is touching an all time high, but the benefits are reaching only a few because most farmers are ignorant about the new, easier to grow varieties, and about agronomic practices that would make the crop less of a risk.
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Desert under siege
The Thar of Pakistan is an arid region troubled by long spells of drought, rapidly falling groundwater levels, abysmally low literacy levels and rudimentary medical centres. But the crisis facing the Thar today stems from beyond all this. It can be traced
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Who will help her learn?
Merely providing schools is not enough to educate the more than 197.34 million illiterate women in India. Far too often, girls have to drop out of school to help their overworked mothers. But female literacy is crucial to a nation"s development and ensuri
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Statehood first, ecology later
Jharkhand"s leaders have successfully pressurised the Centre to consider granting autonomy to this region. But they have still not addressed themselves to local ecological problems
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A crisis overcome
The scourge of sickle cell anaernia buckles down to modern medicine as cytotoxins provide a possible cure
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Mutual interest
Farmers care for the hill slopes only when the hills provide livelihood a simple lesson that has been forgotten
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Brave attempt at a health policy
At the end of day, the biggest <br>problem is the lack of public pressure.<br>Indian people think very little about<br> their health till they fall ill <br>
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Poultry business too serious to be left to industry
The news that Indian poultry in parts of Maharashtra and Gujarat have been detected with the deadly avian influenza virus may have temporarily shaken chicken eaters in the country. But it will be a
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Poor regulators do not a rich country make
IN this past month, farmer associations in Haryana and Tamil Nadu have located and burnt field trials for genetically modified Bt rice. In Chhattisgarh the state government has stopped similar trials
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When markets do work
Some innovations change lives. A favourite of mine is the village milk collection system, a cooperative model. There s a dairy in the village, people bring in milk, the dairy in
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Ending the debt trap & attaining food security
Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's initiative is a major step in recognising the country's debt to farm families but much more needs to be done. Finance Minister P. Chidambaram's budget 2008-09 has aroused widespread interest in methods of saving our small and marginal farming families from indebtedness and acute economic distress, which lead to occasional suicides. The steps proposed in the budget will give relief to nearly four crore farmers, at an estimated outlay of Rs.60,000 crore. As stressed by Mr. Chidambaram, this is a major step in recognising the indebtedness of the country to farm families who, th rough their toil in sun and rain, are safeguarding national food security and sovereignty. The question arises whether this step will mark the end of farmers' dependence on moneylenders and traders for their credit needs. Some of the following issues need consideration: First, the definition of small and marginal farmers has to be different for irrigated and dry farming areas. The present definition classifies marginal farmers as those owning up to 1 hectare and small farmers as those owning 1-2 hectares. Farmers cultivating crops in rainfed, arid, and semi-arid areas may own 4-5 hectares but their income is uncertain and their agricultural destiny is bound closely to the behaviour of the monsoon. A large number of farming families affected by the agrarian crisis in Vidharbha fall under this category. They will not be eligible for debt waiver and debt relief under the present scheme. A second problem relates to the source from which loans have been taken. The programme announced in the budget covers farmers who have taken loans from scheduled commercial banks, regional rural banks, and cooperative credit institutions. It does not cover farmers indebted to moneylenders and traders. According to the National Sample Survey Organisation (NSSO), 48.6 per cent of the farm households surveyed were indebted; of these 61 per cent had operational holdings below 1 hectare. Of the total outstanding debt, 41.6 per cent was taken for purposes other than farm-related activities, such as healthcare and domestic needs; 57.7 per cent of the outstanding amount was sourced from institutional channels and 42.3 per cent from moneylenders, traders, relatives, and friends. It has been estimated that in 2003, non-institutional debt accounted for Rs.48,000 crore; and out of this, Rs.18,000 crore was at an interest of 30 per cent per annum or more (NSSO 59th Round cited by the Economic Survey 2007-08). The Expert Group on Agriculture Indebtedness chaired by Professor R. Radhakrishna has recommended, in its report of July 2007, the inclusion of the financially excluded, particularly the small borrower households, and the adoption of risk-mitigating measures for agriculture. The concept of financial inclusion is in its early stages of operationalisation. Loan waiver is the price we have to pay for the neglect of rural India during the past several decades, as reflected in a gradual decline in investment in key sectors like irrigation, post-harvest technology (even today, farmers dry the harvested paddy on roads), market, and communication. The four crore farmers who are to be relieved of their debt burden before the end of June 2008 will become eligible once again for institutional credit for their cultivation expenses during kharif 2008. The challenge now is to prevent them from getting into the debt trap again. For this purpose, both Central and State governments should set up immediately an Indebted Farmers' Support Consortium at the district level. This should comprise farm scientists, panchayati raj leaders, input supply agencies, representatives of relevant government departments and financial institutions, rural and women's universities and home science colleges, private sector and media representatives, and others relevant to assisting the farmers relieved of their past debt in improving the productivity and profitability of their farms in an environmentally sustainable manner. This is essential for enabling them to have a higher marketable surplus and thereby more cash income. The smaller the farm, the greater is the need for marketable surplus to avoid indebtedness. Such an Indebted Farmers' Support Consortium should get the four crore farmers the benefits of all the government schemes such as the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana, the National Food Security Mission, the Accelerated Irrigation Benefit Programme, the National Horticulture Mission, Rural Godown and Warehousing Schemes, and the National Rural Health Mission. If this is done, every farm family released from the debt trap should be able to produce at least an additional half tonne per hectare of food grains or other farm produce. This should help increase food production by about 20 million tonnes during 2008-10. At a time when global and national food stocks are dwindling and prices are rising, this will be an extremely timely gain for our national food and nutrition security system and for the control of inflation. We should ensure that the outcome of debt waiver is enhanced farmers' income and production. The prevailing gap between potential and actual yields in the crops of rainfed areas such as jowar, bajra, millets, pulses, and oilseeds is over 200 per cent even with the technologies on the shelf. The restarting of the agricultural career of four crore resource-poor farmers through loan waiver could mark a new dawn in both agrarian prosperity and national food sovereignty
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Till the very last rupee
The budget this year provided 15 per cent higher allocation for health and 20 per cent for education. However, this may not mean that more children will learn to read or write or more doctors will be available at public health centres. In the present context, outlays are supposed to be considered ends in themselves. While higher outlays are welcome, there is an urgent need to measure outcomes, the actual effectiveness of a government scheme. A clear index of deliverables is what will lead to other reforms: rewarding states that are doing it right and implementing mid-course correction in areas where the scheme fails to take off. A paragraph towards the end of this year's budget speech shows that the government is beginning to wake up to this need: "I think we do not pay enough attention to outcomes as we do to outlays; or to physical targets as we do to financial targets; or to quality as we do to quantity. Government therefore proposes to put in place a Central Plan Schemes Monitoring System (CPSMS) that will be implemented as a Plan scheme of the Planning Commission.' It is heartening to see an acknowledgement of a long-felt void. As the government disburses more money, there is an even greater need to track it better, to find out a rupee's worth in intervention A versus B or its performance in different states. For now, one has to depend on a few private NGOs/research institutions who fulfill this need: For example, Pratham, an NGO working in the field of primary education, comes out with an annual survey called ASER that has some startling findings on Sarva Siksha Abhiyaan, a Centrally-sponsored programme that aims to put all children into school, even in the remotest parts of India. They found the number of days a teacher is actually teaching in class is abysmally low. They had a percentage for children who are in secondary school but can neither read nor write. There is no government agency that comes up with similar data. India is wasting precious resources if teachers are not found in classrooms after two decades of the existence of this "flagship programme'. The government did make an effort to come out with an "outcome budget' but, according to experts, it was not even worth the paper it was written on. It had never-ending tables with targets achieved in the form of numbers. Drinking water reports had data on the number of taps and villages covered but not the quality, quality and availability of water that is distributed. The outcome budget stops short of measuring important aspects like absenteeism and who is accessing these services created by these schemes. Anyone reading it will be no wiser if she wants to find out where to put the money the next year. Once government has evolved the mechanism of measuring these outcomes, it can take the next step: link performance with outlays for states. Infant mortality rate, extent of immunisation, literacy for women, feeding programmes should be systematically collated to form a clear index. Central share of the scheme's money should be transferred based on the performance of states on this index. The fuzziness on performance has another implication too: the government is not able to under-take mid-course correction. For example, the Supreme Court has asked the government to universalise the Integrated Child Development Programme. With no improvement in malnourishment figures for children, which are higher than that of Sub-Saharan Africa, there is clearly something wrong. The government is starting from scratch in trying to figure out what is going wrong. A fresh committee has been set up to brainstorm, without any data to arrive at clear answers. The number of anganwadis set up each of the last five years, state-wise, is available. But it has no information on whether the anganwadi worker actually comes there, feeds children in the 0-6 age group with supplementary nutrition, takes care of their health and immunisation needs and pays special attention to malnourished children. N.C. Saxena, who is a court-appointed commissioner for monitoring the mid-day meals and the ICDS programme, is a strong votary for measuring outcomes versus outlays. In an article, he goes as far as to suggest action against officers who indulge in bogus reporting of figures. For instance, in Uttar Pradesh, the number of fully immunised children being reported by the state government was almost 100 per cent in 2002-03. A rapid household survey found only 30 per cent of children to be fully immunised. "Such cases of flagrant over-reporting should not go unpunished,' he says, stressing on the need for independent agencies verifying data for the government and then disseminating it widely. Such steps will need a complete change in bureaucratic mindset. This signal from the finance minister, hopefully, will not go unnoticed if India is serious about inclusive growth.
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Saving the World Bank
The new Inspection Panel, whose first brief is Nepal"s Arun III dam, is most certainly a radical step towards self-examination. It may cure the ills that afflict the World Bank - if it doesn"t itself succumb to the infection first, say the autho
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Playing dice with development
Like all such meetings before, the UN World Summit in Copenhagen had to address the needs of the commoner, the bedrock of all nations
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Mushroom boom
Indian farmers are busy harvesting the booming demand for mushrooms. The problem is that it is a delicacy that is rather fastidious about its growing requirements
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Glamorous and profitable, too
Biotechnology, which holds the answers to many persistent problems such as controlling disease and increasing food production, has tremendous potential in cash strapped India. But to succeed, it needs a helping hand from industry.
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For a terra firma
Earth, the cradle of all lifeforms, should not be transformed into a graveyard for want of serious monitoring of soil degradation all over India and the world
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Different flavours
From major fruits like the mango, banana and citrus to minor ones like karonda and sapthei, the story is the same: genetic erosion is leading India's native fruits to the brink of extinction
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Inedible India
<img src="../files/images/20070331/30.jpg" ="inedible" align="left"/> Eating habits, cooking habits, cuisines have changed, are changing, across the country, across social strata, across the rural-urban divide. And for anybody’s money, it isn’t a change to inspire confidence in the future of public health.<br>