Peepli Live - An untold story ... A reality check of societal development.

Peepli Live ... I could not just escape it. You must be thinking me as absurd on a movie review post. Yeah, the hype around me for the film was too much to have evaded, so i too sat with a popcorn.

Its how amazingly a story so simple and non condesending has been used to portray so much...
The real story is not of Mr. Natha but of Hori Mahtoo, the earth digger, who died in his own dugged grave ...
The real story is of the mis-understanding of media, the foolishness of the ilk of Miss Nandita Malik.
The real story is the shame which espionage brings to the profession of journalism.
The real story is of people involved in the political and social system and the kind of accountability they have.

Each of these have such a gaping social angle to it. But lets pick up something more pertinent.The real story is the stark divergence and the story of how farmers are becoming labourers.
A very sensitive issue governing Developmental Economics.

A new generation among the farming community in India is not interested in taking up agriculture as a profession as it is increasingly getting less profitable. Agriculture’s share in the country’s GDP shrunk to 17.5% last year from nearly 30% in the early 1990s.

This thoughts echoes in unison with a growing and worrisome trend in the nation's agriculture sector: Indian farms are failing to attract capital or talent or the 21,000 students who graduate from India's 50 agricultural and veterinary universities. Majority of the farm graduates vie for jobs in the government, or financial institutions, or in private sector industry. They are seldom taking to farming as a profession.And Why should they..? What is the kind of money that is there for them...?

A survey showed 40% of Indian farmers would quit farming, if they had a choice – an alarming revelation for a country where two-thirds of the billion-plus people live in villages. India's farm sector has changed remarkably little since the advent of the Green Revolution, while other industries have been transformed over the past two decades. We have to start realising that farming is becoming an increasingly less profitable profession. There was a time when farmers had very little choice. Things have changed. Farmers would like to make a shift. This has raised concerns that India's farm output could lag demand and the country – which ranks among the world's top three consumers of rice, wheat, sugar, tea, coarse grains and cotton – will become a large food importer unless yields jump. The increase in yields in the past decades have been insignificant.

But the next revolution faces a tougher challenge – in part because of the environmental damage done by the previous one. Back then, abundant groundwater was available and the soil was not degraded by pesticides and fertilisers, which initially helped boost productivity.
With 60% of Indian farms depending on erratic rains, it took just one failed monsoon to force India to import 5 million tonnes of sugar in 2008-09, after exporting a similar quantity a year earlier. The drought, after the worst monsoon rains in 37 years, is also expected to slash rice output by 17%, encouraging India to begin importing rice, after being a leading exporter of the commodity for decades.

Climate change(aka Urbanisation) is having devastating impact on growth and productivity of several crops, particularly the food grain crops, Agriculture in India had always been a toss of heads and tails with monsoon playing such an crucial part. Millions of poor farmers don't have the resources to cope with the uncertainty of monsoons.

If you want to make farming more profitable, the price for farm products needs to be more remunerative. Will the middle class accept this?

The government have to allow genetically modified crops in order to improve farm revenue, and more so to counter the limitations on the supply side. Productivity improvement is the crux of the issue. That is why we need to have an understanding of GM foods. However, without taking any stand n this issue, We should be alarmed by the mammoth number of seasonal farmers becoming full time urban labourers, propelling India's infrastructure growth story.

A lot of the farmers have become wage labourers in the urban cities where their day earnings are 90-250 depending on the city and the kind of money slosh around. Today you find labourers, plumbers and welders, are all moving from a city like Kolkata to Kerala... and from Kerala to Gulf ...

8 million farmers have quit job in the census of 1991-2001. That is 10 years way back, would be waiting for the recent census to startle India and its intellectuals. Its time India realised it has looked into the Jai Jawan, (you are payng them well with one Pay commssions after another) but the Jai Kisan, is about to loose its identity... What would be our identity 20 years from now ... An pathetic America in the making ??? A question which should be answered fast and addressed soon.

Kudos to Anusha Rizvi... Mam you have just earned a fan... Its time academic institutions started adressing these issues with more seriousness than making case studies on films ... and awarding doctorates to Mr. Amitabh Bachchans, Shilpa Shettys and Akshay Kumars..