A for Agriculture.

Started gardening farming as a hobby in my home. My interest on this grew. And so started droogling to unravel, decipher, discover the beauty of this industry. Urban Agriculture(farming in city) is a sold concept in US, Autralia, New zealand and also in many other countries. If there is one country that stands as big example to the world in Urban Agriculture(UA) and creating sustainable city is China. Beijing is the capital city of china and despite it being one of the fastest growing economy in the world the Beijing city has  a lot of green cover. Only 20% of the city is built on and the rest 80% is being used for agricultural purposes. Now because of this, the required amount of foods that is needed to feed the city is produced in the city itself. Now vegetables/food items produced over here will be cheaper because there is almost no travel involved. Also the waste produced by the city is converted to organic manure and is used in UA. Look, the city produces food for it needs and also has infrastructure to process its own waste. Thus the city is self sustainable. This self sustainability has come because of its city planners and politicians resisting the temptation for growth. Surely lot of money can be generated if more space is allowed to be built on. But they have set up a committee to make urban agriculture more competitive and to generate more money.

Now if we look into India, Urban Planning is a mess. Few drops of rain the cities are flooded. Rivers are all polluted. No proper infrastructure for sanitation. Mosquito menace is very high. Epidemic diseases like chikengunya, malaria, dengue and many more keep coming every now and then. Cities are congested with building and now they are getting congested with fly overs and many other infrastructural developments. City limits are ever expanding and agricultural lands are getting converted into SEZ for creating state of the art polluting factories.

Well, what really pricks me is the way in which we copy the west in the name of development. West grew due to industrialization….GOOD!!! but why the hell we need to copy the same for our development. Why don’t we look into our strength and our weakness and do things accordingly for our development. India has the second highest arable land in the world after china.All types of climatic conditions are prevalent in India. And all types of soil are present. We also top in producing wheat, grains and milk. In fact India has the potential to become the food supplier to the world by 2015. Yet our farmers commit suicide because we are more cared about INDUSTRIALIZATION and INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY than AGRICULTURE.

The madness of people going for industrialization is shown in the case of Tata Motors being awarded singur for manufacturing Nano. The truth is Singur is the most fertile land in the whole of Bengal and the project site choosen by tata motors is the most fertile one in singur. The poor farmers from whom the agricultural land was forcibly confiscated were beaten up for raising their voice against the acquisition and even were fired. Now after Tata going out of singur this most fertile land is totally abandoned. Now what farmers who were dependent on this land for their income will do? Tata was able to find another land but where would these poor farmers go? Similarly, in mumbai for the expansion of the airport the government decided to destroy mangrove forests. The reason they do so is that, they do not want India to be a poor agricultural state but a rich industrialized one. Here my question is

why cant we convert India from a poor agricultural
country to a rich agricultural country?

Today for feeding people who live in cities which would be about 30% of the total population of India atleast 60% of productive land in rural area is used. Only 10 to 15% of the productive lands produce is exported. Now why IT booms. It is simply because they produce the product here and EXPORT it in other country and get a huge margin for the same. If the same thing happens in agriculture surely agriculture will start booming. But there are big regulationary laws in place for exporting agriculture produce. Reason? If there is no such regulation farmers would export all their produce and city people will not get any food to eat. In order to protect the interests of urban people, such laws arre in place which affect the farmers. This is where China is being very smart. By creating cities that could produce their own food, they could now allow 100% of the produce from rural china to be exported. Clearly they want to beat India and want to become food factory of the world. Despite having all potential we are simply not worried about this. In school days in history I learnt that India had huge amount of gold which got looted by other countries from us. I dont think that is true? We would not have valued the gold that we had and we gave it away. Similarly now we do not value the agricultural land that we have and we give it away to petty stuffs and surely later we will all cry saying that we had huge amount of agricultural land with us.

Dear policy makers, economists, industrialists kindly rethink and ensure if you make any economic sense?

My take : Agriculture is our strength. If proper measures are given to it ,it will make more money than IT and you will find marwari people entering into farming. And without correcting the grave mistakes that we have done in agriculture, India cannot have sustainable growth.