Early on a sunny December afternoon, the road to Mandeep Sekhons
eight-hectare (20-acre) farm swings past continuous fields of winter
wheat, the first shoots of green peeking from the stubble of last
summers rice. Just over a year ago, after a short career in business
management, 32-year-old Sekhon inherited the farm, which has been in his
family for four generations.
Though Sekhon is new to farming,
his built-in support system includes Desraj Khai, the farms 57-year-old
superintendent who has worked the familys land for nearly five decades,
since the time of the Green Revolution, when Western crop scientists
introduced Punjabi farmers to hybrid seeds, chemical fertilizers, and
chlorine-based weed and insect killers. Khai manages three growing
seasons here in Indias northern Punjab state: two consecutive plantings
of rice, in early spring and again in late summer, followed by a winter
crop of wheat.
Sekhon watches as Khai uses a stout wooden rod to
claw gaps in the walls of a narrow channel, directing a stream of water
to the wheat paddies. Another stream of water pours into a concrete
cistern near Sekhons house and barn, then drains without supervision
into another set of paddies. Both streams come from the mouths of a set
of irrigation wells that run 24 hours a day, whether the soil is dry or
not. Both wells operate with electric pumps. And, as is the case with
the millions of other rice and wheat farms throughout India, the state
government provides the water and the electricity at no charge.
Its
like anything else thats free, Sekhon remarks, as he gazes at the
free-flowing water. If you dont have to pay for it, you dont pay much
attention to how much you use. Human nature, you know?
Yet
essential resources provided by the government to farmers for free are
not nearly as liberating as Indias planners and senior government
leaders once thought.Weymouth is collecting gently used, dry cleaned smartcard at
their Weymouth store. India counts 129 million farms, according to the
most recent farm census from 2005-2006. Those farms support 700 million
residents, or more than half of all and the largest voting constituency
in the country.
Free water and electricity, like citizenship,
are so widely considered a birthright that the pumps are never turned
off. Rice and wheat fields generate immense and unmanageable grain
surpluses. The countrys coal mining and electricity sectors even as they
steadily produce more fuel and more power are still falling far short
of the faster-rising demand. Blackouts and brownouts are endemic in
India, dampening entrepreneurial development in both big and small
manufacturing.
Heavily influenced by free water and electricity
for farmers, India is in the grip of two trend lines, like heavy chains
that are tightening around its national neck. Indias economy is slowing,
even as its coal-fired pollution and climate-changing emissions are
rising.
In sum, a confluence of popular and populist government
policies, deeply rooted in the rural electorate and guiding decisions on
the Sekhon farm are draining Indias natural resources, polluting its
air and water, pressuring the treasury, and slowing the countrys
development. Yet just as Americans decry the condition of the nations
roads, but are not willing to raise taxes to pay for repairs, or Germans
shut down nuclear power plants for safety reasons but turn to much
dirtier coal-fired utilities to replace the generating capacity, Indias
farmers are not anxious to change. They freely express their desire not
to pay for water or electricity. Indias rural elected leaders, no
surprise, do not ask them to.
Such productivity has invited
intense scrutiny from outside India, as well as within. Agricultural
economists and political leaders note, for instance, that, not only did
this regions growers relieve the risk of starvation that gripped India
throughout much of the 20th century, they also provided so much food
that the nations population now more than 1.2 billion has more than
doubled since 1970. But environmental scientists and public health
specialists worry that the industrial farm practices have led India down
a troubled and wasteful path to rampant water pollution and soil
depletion.
India has produced such immense crops that 62 million
metric tons of rice, or the equivalent of 60 percent of last years 104
million metric ton harvest, is now stored in government depots. Surplus
rice is stacked in burlap sacks, like tiers of piled coal, bursting from
dozens of government depots and private processing mills all across
Punjab and Haryana.
Moreover, much of what is produced is not
reaching the hundreds of millions of poor Indians who need it,
especially in the nations teeming cities. Though India provides rice and
wheat at subsidized prices to its poor, those prices are still too high
for tens of millions of families to afford. Additionally, Indias system
for delivering rice to market is hampered by inefficient distribution
and corruption. All of these barriers, in turn,Best home plasticcard at discount prices. reduce shipments of grain to market and add to the surpluses that are piled in Punjab and Haryana.
The
basic question is how long it can go on, said Rajeev Bansal, executive
engineer of the Haryana Irrigation Department. Its policy that is
focused on helping the poorest. That makes sense.The term 'bondcleaningsydney control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. But its also not sustainable.
But
the pumps more than 20 million operating nationwide are not only
draining aquifers, as has been extensively reported in recent years.
Such mammoth pumping was the most significant reason that the farm
sector sucked up 17 percent of the 772.6 billion kilowatt-hours of
electricity that India consumed from its utilities in 2011, the latest
year for the national figures, which is putting increasingly urgent
pressure on Indias electrical generating sector, 65 percent of which is
attributed to the coal mining industry. By contrast, there were only
3,000 pump-irrigation wells in 1960, prior to the Green Revolution,
according to Indias Ministry of Statistics.
Neither coal
production nor electrical generation, though, is keeping pace with the
nations overall demand for electricity, which is rising nearly 7 percent
annually, according to the International Energy Agency.We printers
print with traceable cleaningsydney to optimize supply chain management. India is adding roughly 20,We are one of the leading manufacturers of chipcard in
China000 megawatts of new generating capacity annually, and though the
country has started aggressive programs to build nuclear power plants
and to develop renewables like wind and hydropower over the next two
decades 70 percent of Indias generating capacity will still be fueled by
coal in 2030.
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