"Rishab Aiyer Ghosh" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
a great interview [1] on india together with p sainath, who won the
Excellent, though there's something that wikipedia would call POV in there.. he does have strong opinions on a few things that I would disagree with.
summarised in four words - more of the same. And the babalog who've learned their economics from Tom Friedman - not Milton Friedman, but Tom! - are telling us about free markets, and how subsidies like support
WONDERFUL quote, this.
chemical-contaminated, corporate-produced stuff. In 1984, when I first visited the US, there were only a few small farmers' markets here and there. This year, there were markets that I found hard to enter, because they're so crowded.
Agreed - that and chains like whole foods. But how much does this gel with the other fact, about a hundred or so small american farmers going bankrupt every other month (or year)?
Because ministers in the government are close to sprinkler makers in Jalgaon. Or they want to push drip irrigation kits they have imported from Israel and want to dump on farmers here. Israeli agriculture is total bogus, it won't last three weeks without American aid. And in any case, drip and sprinklers that work in the Negev desert are not exactly built for Lonavala, with 2400 mm of rain!
All due respect to sainath, but the israeli kits are actually very good.. and if people are able to grow crops in a wasteland like the negev, they are clearly effective. Only, as he says, lonavla is not exactly the right place to deploy them. Marathwada and North Karnataka for example, definitely are - dry, arid places with a thin layer of laterite soil (volcanic rock, basically), where most of the crops there are millet (jowar) and such.
You can't blindly deploy them though - ICRISAT (www.icrisat.org) - a UN agency that deals with agriculture in semi arid tropics, and HQ'd Hyderabad, plus based in several countries, has an excellent paper that I googled up on what needs to be done: http://www.icrisat.org/ESA/Can_Drip_Irrigation.pdf
caste, and start screaming "I've never discriminated against anyone." Or we have rubbish like the AIIMS students agitating, while we're quietly finding out about segregated canteens and so on. We must tackle caste,
Er.. he found segregated canteens at AIIMS? That would be ironic indeed. These do exist elsewhere but not at AIIMS, as far as I'm aware
srs
