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I am not sure how the government and the bureaucrats function in this great country. Do they even think of the pros and cons of their actions and the decisions they take before they make them into laws? Programs such as Free Power for farmers or the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS) have caused more grief to the farmers than good. These popular programs are going to be a big drain on the tax payers’ money and I am not even sure if it is taking the country in the right direction to prosperity. This is not even like the Robin Hood style of robbing the rich to pay for the poor. It is robbing the working middle class to pay for the lazy people.
One may ask how anything free can be bad. Anything given free is probably not very useful to the giver and most likely not very useful to the receiver either. Otherwise wouldn't you think it may have ended up on eBay? The free power supply is so random and so erratic that it is almost impossible to predict when this 7 hours of free power is supplied and in how many installments. I am an IT professional turned farmer now, and I have to face the music. The free power supply is not very useful if it is not provided when it is really needed. It is difficult these days to engage farm workers, and when you do, you have no power supply. Without power there is no water and without water it is difficult to do paddy transplantation or for that matter any farm activity. Adding to these power woes, the cost of employing farm workers has gone up significantly since the implementation of NREGS. I am not saying that the farm workers should not be paid well. The problem is that the NREGS program is making people lazy. The projects taken up under this program are not goal oriented and the quantity or quality of work is not even measureable. Now, why would someone work hard in the fields when the government is providing guaranteed income without much hard work? How could a nation develop if its elected government is making the countrymen lazy? Tilling the soil and producing food is hard work. I know it, because I am doing it. I think farmers like teachers, are the least paid in this country, and hence they are fewer and fewer people opting for these professions. In my opinion, farming and teaching are two noble professions that are not taken very seriously. Without farmers we will not have the food to eat and without teachers we probably would still be living in the jungles. These popular schemes originally designed to abate farmer suicides are probably going to make the farm produce cost dearly to the consumers or cause more farmer suicides because of the increased cost of production and the debt (death) trap the farmers are getting into. I wish it to be the former so there is equitable distribution of the wealth. Why should a software engineer working in an air-conditioned office acquire more wealth than a farmer sweating in the sun? The day when farming becomes a viable profession and when a farmer is looked up with equal importance to that of a white collared professional, the migration of people from rural areas to cities will automatically stop. Both rural and urban areas can peacefully co-exist with mutual respect. So for the people in power and for the people who are making these decisions, I want the schemes designed to truly help the farmers have a better life and better income. The schemes should provide incentives for the hard working and not the hardly working people.
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After months of feeling depressed with the way things are around me, the reckless attitude of people, the growing number of cars, the traffic snarls, the polluted air, the stinking water bodies, the summer heat waves and in general the changing environment that had almost made me averse to new gadgets, I feel I have found some light at the end of the tunnel while searching for answers. Some awakening has happened within me in the last few days during my trip to Srisailam. I have become aware of the fact that not everything is lost. Nature has bestowed on us all the wonderful resources and it is up to us on how best we utilize them, so they last forever.
I feel there is nothing wrong in developing new technologies and gadgets, in the name of economic growth and human welfare, as long as we do so responsibly and give nature its due respect. Everything that is mined from earth's underground should be used judiciously, and after its use, it should either be repurposed or recycled. We all know that resources such as water, air, soil, metals and minerals, though abundant, are still finite in quantity and cannot sustain our present ways and the “Use and Throw” paradigm of the 20th century modern human society. We need to understand that all the natural wealth provided to us is not disposable and we don’t own them. We only have usufruct rights to the planet – to enjoy them while we live on this planet and leave it unaltered and without damaging it. With better healthcare and better life expectancy the world population is ever increasing. With the increasing demand for energy we should look to the skies to harvest the "almost" unlimited solar energy instead of using up all the non-renewable fossil fuels. One might argue that even fossil fuels are renewable. That argument may very well become true if nature were to have its way, meaning, we humans could all perish at once and turn into fossil fuel, in a million years, to the then surviving life form. I am not sure if that would be humans though. Spilling the guts of our planet is not going to do us any good. It would turn our planet into a humongous garbage bin like the one shown in the movie WALL-E. Here's a very simple concept. When you have a duck that lays golden eggs, would you nurture it well so you get a golden egg every day, or would you, submitting to greed, kill the duck and end up with your last egg? The answer is obviously nurture. Right? So then let us nurture the nature so we have this wonderful planet forever. One of the natural solar harvesting process known to us is photosynthesis, so we ought to plant and grow as many trees as possible, while we continue to do research to find a technology that harvests this “almost” unlimited solar energy in an equally efficient and economic way. We all have the responsibility, as the generation that has caused the current problems, to find the solutions and leave the planet in a livable condition for the generations to come. So let’s all collaborate and make a collective effort to find the next major human invention or discovery. A tree like thing that we can manufacture in our factories that which harvests the solar energy. Ideas, anyone??? How about we use social networking website like Facebook as an enabling technology for this purpose? While we search for ideas and solutions we should follow the ancient saying which means "You protect the trees and the trees will protect you" |
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Nature loving environment enthusiast.
-- Venky Talla Archives
March 2021
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