God give them strength and us some compassion.

                I was having dinner in front of the TV a few minutes back and watching TV, CNBC TV 18, India Business Hour. The news which captured the headlines and apparently dragged down the sensex today was the announcement that, the Met Dept had predicted below normal monsoons for this year. This was a double whammy, especially for farmers of Punjab, Haryana and Himachal, whose spring season crops have been badly battered by unseasonal rains in March leading to a spate of suicides. In fact, just today, a farmer committed suicide in full public view during a rally of Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal, who apparently didn’t even get off the stage to try and do anything to help save the farmer.

                The program subsequently highlighted the plight of farmers in rural India, focusing on a place called Yavatmal in Maharashtra, supposedly the “farmer suicide capital” of India. I watched it with the same disconnect that probably one feels when watching a program about how poverty is affecting Sub Saharan Africa- something that is far away, nothing to concern us, just another statistic. Till they mentioned the cause of his suicide – “a 3 lakh loan” which he was unable to repay because of a poor harvest and the prospects of a poor monsoon which meant more loans, just sapped his will to live. I have just come back from a holiday abroad with my family where I spent about 3 lakhs. My holiday was the same as the price of a farmer’s life…….

                Isn’t there something terribly wrong and incorrect in what is happening around us? I mean, we are beating our breasts about crap like net neutrality and the earth day and sharing birthdays and parties and holiday pics on facebook and twitter while people are dying around us. Isn’t this ridiculous?? I mean, I am not even rich, I am barely middle class and yet I am so far removed from 60% of the country’s population who can barely eke out a living. And what about the really poor, the ones who don’t even make the Rs 24 or Rs 27 a day line established by our government?

                I was reading the outlook magazine of 23 Mar, an article by a Mr P Sainath, and you know what he says, “this year’s budget write offs towards Corporate loans, customs duties, etc amounts to Rs 5.49 lakh Crore- 5,049,00,00,00,000”. In the past 10 years, the government has written off Corporate related dues of 42 Lakh Crore, that’s 42 followed by twelve zeroes. And this years budget has reduced the outlay for agriculture by Rs 5000 Crores. The 42 lakh crores could have sustained MNREGA for 121 years. Arundhati Rao called it a “cluster fuck” between the powerful and the rich.

                It doesn’t even make any sense anymore-  India is the country with the maximum potential today, soon we will have the largest middle class, become the 2^nd or 3^rd largest economy and what-still leave half a billion people behind in poverty?? Who are not even sure if their dads will even be alive next harvest time? Isn’t this profoundly unfair? Shouldn’t We be doing something about it? Can we do something about it?