Friends,
I feel myself fortunate for having heard Sri Devinder Sharma
speaking impromptu in Bangalore two years back about the plight of farmers
in India. He spoke for nearly an hour and a half in English but the
audience, many of whom were not so well-versed in English, remained glued to
their seats and maintained a pin-drop silence.
Since then I started reading him. The moderators and members of the JK Forum
should feel honoured that Sri Sharma is writing in this forum.
The point he raised in this article is very serious in nature and the
government of India should understand the spreading tentacles of the MNCs in
the universities. I always felt that the agriculture universities never
proved helpful to the farmers but the MNCs did. However their help came with
many conditions and sanctions.
I wonder when people say there are number of research works happening in the
agriculture universities but is the research work reflecting in the fields
anywhere in any part of India? The answer is a big no.
Instead of universities, the solutions to the farmers' problems are offered
by the MNCs. How the MNCs, sitting seven seas away know the agriculture
related difficulties faced by the farmers in India is something very
intriguing. Apparently there is a big nexus between the agriculture
universities, government agriculture departments, research scholars, MNCs
and the governments of the developed nations.
Some eight years back attempts were made to sell hundreds of varieties of
rice collected by Dr Richharia in the Indira Gandhi Agriculture University
(IGAU), Raipur many decades ago. Hail the IGAU authorities who mixed all the
seeds and now no one knows, which rice variety is known as what. As this was
not enough, a conspiracy was hatched to sell the entire rice bank to an MNC.
Timely action by the rights activists saved the bank from going into the
hands of the MNC.
The university was again in the news for the bad reason around three years
back when the germplasm of a rich Jatropha variant was 'smuggled' out. The
scientist, who was doing research work, suddenly quit the job and joined an
MNC, which was also doing 'research' on Jatropha.
