mr.thackeray shows people without a place their place

india tries you very hard..some images stick in your mind, despite the fact that you think you've grown inured, hardened. like this recent news clip which showed pigs tearing apart a new-born baby outside a hospital. or this image from just yesterday: a group of youths slapping around a street vendor in mumbai. kicked basket, strewn samosas, slapped vendor- each of them worth as much as the baby.

think of the others who were shown their place- taxi drivers, scrawny passengers on equally decrepit local trains, paan wallahs. think of their place. in god's and mankind's scheme of things. what place?

chet'ta rejo: 30 hindus, 1547 others

spotted an extract from a press release from rakesh sharma (of final solution) here. mr.sharma has just released two new films- this is about one of them (chet'ta rejo):

The back cover of the CD itself contextualizes the film – the saffronisation of the Dalit-OBC population and its consequent plight! The film looks specifically at the patterns of arrests and litigation since 2002. A majority of those charged with rioting, arson, murder etc are either tribals or Dalits and OBCs. An analysis of those arrested from 32 police stations in Ahmedabad suggests that of the 1577 detainees, only 30-odd were upper caste! Are these foot soldiers victims too? Cynically recruited, then discarded, left to rot in jails, what do the ‘perpetrators of the violence feel today about the VHP and the BJP?

The film has several personal portraits and conversations. Among the points that emerge:

1. 6-8 families of S-6 passengers who died speak of how they were told people were going for a picnic tour, certainly not any karseva, that the VHP-BJP exploited their tragedy for electoral gains in 2002, how ever since then no one has come to help, how monies raised in their name never reached them…and how some of them who spoke in public about it have been threatened by the VHP!

2. VHP made tall promises to help the detained and the injured Hindutva cadre, but barring some rations and monetary help in the first month or two, not much came. The VHP/BJP combine simply vanished. A telling story is Kanti and Deepak’s account from Gomtipur - both shot by the police, both appealed to the BJP for help (incl the CM) but got nothing. When they went to Togadia’s own Dhanvantri hospital for operations/ treatment, they were turned away, asked to bring a deposit of Rs 50,000 first!

3. Cops don’t arrest the upper castes. They come and take away Dalits/OBCs - any men they can find in the area. The men are normally told to come along for haziri but then booked formally. Women in such families speak of the subsequent harassment and hardships.

4. Dalits ask why violence is engineered in their areas, and not in the posh upper caste areas? They ask a series of searching, probing questions and offer their own analyses throughout the film.

5. Dalit elders speak of how the Ram Mandir at Ayodhya doesn’t mean much to them, as they can not even enter the mandir in their own villages - upper castes prevent them from doing so till today!

7. An OBC Hindu boy and a Muslim boy, both friends, used to play cricket together in Behrampura. During the riots, both lost their right hands to bombs during the riots! The film ends with both of them appealing to the youth not to join such parties or get involved in such violence as no one lifts a finger to help while it is them and their families who will suffer forever.

The overall message that emerges through a range of voices - violence and politics of hate destroys the Dalit-OBC-Muslim communities; it is best to stay away from parties that preach hate.

my earlier posts on gujarat are here: [1], [2] and [3].

telangana for idiots, of idiots..

i wish i could've said telangana is the opium of the masses. but nobody knows for sure it is so- the more fortunate, in terms of education etc., are more vocal on it. and so vocal that they have managed to drown genuine debates on development in the state in the last three years or so. i think the congress likes that: the congress has thrived whenever the focus of the public in any region (read punjab, kashmir, northeast etc) got diverted to emotive issues. and the parivar likes emotive issues too. there is another thing that congress and the parivar both like: smaller states. the pseudo-logic that both together have developed runs like this: it is easier to administer smaller states. don't ask 'how many districts in chhattisgarh does the government of chhattisgarh actually administer?'

the truth is that both the congress and the parivar find it increasingly difficult to survive in large states. it's much easier to arrive at 'power sharing' arrangements in states that have around a hundred assembly seats (witness goa). it's ok even if you manage to win only 25 seats or so- you'll always find two three 'regional parties' and enough 'independents' 'like-minded' enough to share power with you. and at the centre: all dissenting voices would have no choice but to cling to one or the other national alliance, headed of course by the congress or the parivar.

and don't mention federalism and other nonsense: what does it matter if to keep all indians together you've to break up linguistic minorities?

formula one: works in delhi, but not in hyderabad

call yourself whatever fancy name you will: leftist, liberal, socialist, communist, nehruvian liberal, gandhian...but explain this to me: how is formula one ok for delhi but not so for hyderabad? mr.p.sainath?

as dr.rajasekhar reddy points out (in the second story), the track and the necessary infrastructure would've cost the state over 1000 crores over several years. but would've ensured employment for over 20,000 people directly, and over 50,000 indirectly. and let me rub more salt in: dr.reddy has been accused of siphoning away several thousand crores in the last three and a half years by all the parties in the opposition. including all those in the media who had hailed the voting out of naidu in the state and the ushering in of the u.p.a in the centre as a great victory for the poor in the country. so what was saved? and who was served? .

i'll tell you what could've been saved. and who could've been served. the race track would've meant several thousands of those poor migrants from mahbubnagar could've saved on the bus fare to mumbai in the past three years. and many of them could have found employment in the track coming up in their neighbourhood.

but sainath, i think, won't be able to offer his views on the issue in the near future. right now, he probably has to race to the next speaking engagement...and then the next..

india smoking

in the back of an auto-rickshaw moving in jerks in every direction, trying with every jerk to find a 3 ft wide breach in the here and now, i suddenly notice this little advertising sign (of a new magazine/newspaper). it says, in telugu:

tomorrow, outsiders will queue up for work permits in india. you'll be the witness.

that almost jerked me out of my getaway vehicle. i look around and check what's changed: i still see people, cars, autos, buses, bicycles, motorcycles, people- all moving in all directions to get out of this..here and now. and the u.s. consulate will start its operations in hyderabad in a few months.

shuddh cow shit

this is one way of looking at these national awards: if bharat ratna is for individuals who build bharat, the jnanpith award is for those who define it. loosely.

in my last post, i'd pointed out that at least 18 of the 40 bharat ratna recipients until now have been brahmins- which means about half of those who built bharat are brahmins. if you think that's an oversimplification, that one community couldn't have built bharat, please check how bharat is defined. over 26 of around 40 jnanpith awardees until now have been brahmins- a bharat defined by brahmins could only be built by brahmins.

and if you think the relationship between nationbuilders and the writing classes is never so cordial, never so agreeable: do you think all of them received the prize for writing the same thing, or holding the same views?

not just agreement, approval, praise but even angst, dissent, rebellion, disapproval- everything has to smell like cow shit. if any shit isn't processed by some cow's holy entrails, tough shit, it won't be acceptable. if x, or another cow like him, disapproves of something, only y, or another cow like him, can disagree with him. any buffalo that butts in with its own shit is as welcome as bovine spongiform encephalopathy.

any questions, that concern india's present, past or future are best debated by the cows- only they've the right to lock horns. and on their elegant shoulders lies the burden of both: making policy and opposing it. of agreement and dissent. and that's holy shit..i mean, writ.

bharat ratna or brahmin ratna?

at least 18 of them have been brahmins. not counting others i'm not sure about. most of the others are from other 'upper castes': vaishyas, kayasths, khatris, baidyas. one parsi, a few muslims, two christians. one dalit and three obcs (if you consider m.s.subbulakshmi, married to a brahmin and upholder of brahminical high culture, an obc).

the most important contenders this year too were mostly from the brahmin and other upper caste communities- vajpayee, jyoti basu, sachin tendulkar. one of them would've got it if some busybodies hadn't dragged in kanshi ram's polluting name. a minor consolation: vinod dua, who has been speaking against caste (i mean, the lower castes) since mandal 1 and barkha dutt, who has been speaking against caste (the lower castes, again) since mandal 2 have both been awarded the padma shri. rajdeep sardesai, whose caste speaks so eloquently, has also been awarded the padma shri, for proposing sachin tendulkar's name and elevating the debate on the bharat ratna (after some narrowminded spoilports, as i had pointed out earlier, had brought in some unsavoury names: like ram manohar lohia, a vaishya who hobnobbed with the lower castes and jagjivan ram, and so on) to a higher plane.

one feels, some people need to understand that a bharat ratna can't be awarded along narrow caste lines: one has to rise above caste and become a brahmin in order to claim that honour.

wear a black badge in your mind, please

JNU to spread wings to SAARC countries

such an evocative headline- conjures up images of an institution of learning so brave, so noble that it refuses to bow down to man-made divides. the news report goes on to say:

'We want to attract students from all over the world to study in our university. Hence we are planning to open our entrance examination centres in Pakistan, and consecutively in all the SAARC countries soon,' H.B. Bahidar, chief proctor of JNU, told IANS.

and, it looks like, jnu does welcome students from all over the world:

The Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) attracts students from all over the country and abroad, and from diverse strata of society. JNU has come to be deemed the best University in the nation today and is among the better- known Universities of the world. In the academic year 2001-2002, JNU had 186 foreign students from 34 countries from all over the world, a fair chunk of them coming from South- East Asia, Central Asia, Africa, Europe and the USA.

students from 34 countries! jnu has, from the very beginning, reached out to the world. is there a nation or wanna-be nation in the world where jnu hasn't opposed imperialism or neo-imperialism or colonialism or neo-colonialism or fascism or neo-fascism or capitalism or neo-liberalism or apartheid...? a people that jnu hasn't embraced and empathized with or a 'people's struggle' that it hasn't endorsed or taken out marches to 'express solidarity' with?

and it's not just the jnu, many other 'premier' indian institutions have- through their research, students, faculty- scaled borders and oceans and let the world know, they're with them. be it nasa or the world bank or citibank or aereated beverage makers or universities or hospitals or governments or ..human rights organizations.

but the only people students/teachers/researchers etc from jnu and other premier institutions find it very difficult to reach out to, embrace, empathise with are indians themselves. other indians. students, teachers, researchers etc from communities other than those represented in one form or the other at jnu and the other institutions. of the 6000 castes/communities/tribes in india i do not think any aspirant who wasn't from a select group of 100-200 communities had ever stepped into any of these institutions other than by sheer accident. i do not think jnu has students, researchers, teachers from even 34 indian communities, right now.

nations are mostly endogamous, so are these indian communities. next time you take out a march or express solidarity with a nation at the other end of the atlas, you bloody hypocrites, remember that you never ever raised your hand in anything resembling a decent wave to even acknowledge the existence of these nations outside your gates. never ever uttered even a decent squeak of protest whenever they were stopped from entering. tomorrow, when you attend a class, teach a class, write a paper, read, debate, work in a lab, wear a black badge in your mind, at least. because i'd like to retain my humanity, because i'd like to be able to express my solidarity with you, some day.

the illogic of gujarat

a few quotes from a slightly old article on the sachar report by a well-known columnist- who's he?

On Thursday the Lok Sabha approved a bill providing a 27% reservation for "Other Backward Classes" in Central educational institutions by a voice vote, which means that there was such unanimity that there was no need for a vote. These benefits have no economic conditionality: the rich among these castes will be the ones who will of course benefit far more than the poor.

does that sound like arun shourie?

The government, and Parliament, did not need a special commission, and a report with 404 pages of statistics, charts and comments, to tell them to do this. They just went ahead and did it. Other Indian communities get jobs on command. Indian Muslims get commissions. The Rajinder Sachar Committee, appointed soon after Dr Manmohan Singh became Prime Minister, is the latest one.

definitely not arun shourie.

The communities who benefit from job and educational reservations are better off than Muslims, financially, socially and psychologically. There are no riots against Other Backward Classes, for instance, that are aimed at terrorising the community and destroying entrepreneurs who may have set up a means of survival.

pratap bhanu mehta?

The reality is that there isn’t much of a cake left. The major growth of jobs is now in the private sector, not the public sector, which is excellent news for the country. To seek reservations in the private sector, as some backward militants insist on doing, would become a negative burden on growth. In a democracy, economics must occasionally pay a price to politics, but that would be a price too high. There have to be other means through which we can straighten the imbalance of decades.

pratap bhanu mehta. definitely.

Will reserving seats for Muslims as a category help? The instant answer is yes: if this is the way the political game is being played, then why should Muslims and Christians be excluded from the game? Almost everyone else has been allotted a piece of the cake, so why not them? Are they paying the price for being "foreign faiths", that is, religions that originated outside the Indian subcontinent? If that is the truth, then the establishment should change the truth before the people change the establishment. If that is not the truth, then someone should let us know what the truth is.

definitely not pratap bhanu mehta. who then? from an older piece of writing by the same author:

Law and order have two enemies: the Full Truth and the Complete Lie. When people realize the truth, they start revolutions. When they are fed lies they begin meaningless riots. Lies are the staple of every communal disturbance. They are spread by people who have a stake in this stupid violence, who have something to gain out of impoverished Hindus and Muslims fighting each other. Businessmen, traders, politicians, goondas, leaders of ‘cultural organizations’(like the Hindu Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh —RSS) feed the people with lies, watch these lies become convictions in people’s hearts, watch the passions build up, and then these leaders actually set up the events which will provoke a conflagration.

who killed muslims in gujarat? impoverished hindus? listen to someone who knows:

Until Godhra happened, the upper castes would never come out… Baniyas… Patels… they would never come out… But we mobilised them… told them that we had prepared teams from the police and amongst advocates… that if they went to jail, we would get them released.

it was the obcs then who did most of the killing, because very few from the castes higher up were involved. are the obcs impoverished? m.j.akbar, author of the first article, doesn't seem to think so. but m.j.akbar, author of the second article, would agree, i guess.

when you're busy sucking upto the brahmins- when all you want is their approval, their endorsement, their patronage and their acceptance...i guess you wouldn't have much time left to understand either the muslims or the obcs. right, mr.akbar?

my earlier posts on gujarat: [ 1 ] & [ 2 ].

the puke that india throws up

ntr used to say: kendramu oka mithya. that was badly translated by the english language press as: the centre is a myth. but the phrase speaks, despite the translation, you'll agree. if imperial london was an ugly idea, an everyday lesson in humiliation, so in many ways is delhi. perhaps, more ways.

he spent most of the last twenty five years in america, but he managed to buy a congress party ticket (for a price of rs.2 crores, the rumour goes) and win (by spending some rs.7 crores, the rumour goes) from the nizamabad lok sabha constituency in 2004. now he is actively engaged in trying to secure the support of sonia gandhi, who (i don't wish to press this point, but it needs to be made) was born and raised in italy, for the dismemberment of the state of andhra pradesh.

i've lived all my life (which is considerably more than twenty five years) in india but i still find it hard to digest some of the puke that it throws up every day.

there's another child..and another

there was this kid next door. i never saw him, but i knew he was there because one could hear his mother yelling at him once in a while. more during what's called the exams season. one day, last year, he hanged himself (i learnt that later, from another neighbour). i still hear the mother, once in a while. she has another child.

the movie taare zameen par has become so popular, i guess more kids would be named ishaan now. and more parents would send their kids to boarding schools that promise to offer special treatment.

blogbharti spells diversity

around 1830 unique blogs/sites linked to in around an year (maybe less). through around 2,100 posts. rough estimates- but, i guess you know what those figures mean. precisely.

manmohan singh on subsidies- do you really want to know what he said?

manmohan singh tells the country:

"We spend far too much money funding subsidies in the name of equity, with neither equity objective nor efficiency objective being met," he said while speaking at the Golden Jubilee celebrations of the Institute of Economic Growth in New Delhi.

The Prime Minister called for more rational solutions to deal with the problems of regional imbalance and inequities in growth.

who asked him his opinion, anyway? i am sure the congress party doesn't want to know what he thinks. neither does the left. nor do karunanidhi, laloo prasad yadav, sharad pawar, ram vilas paswan and mayawati.

for the last three years, on rare occasions, at the little boys's parties (that no one really significant in the government bothers to attend) that he is allowed to go to unchaperoned, manmohan singh has made similar noises...but his minders know better. they brought in the employment guarantee act which guarantees steady incomes to village level politicians, fixers and sundry entrepreneurs, state governments like andhra pradesh and tamil nadu have issued ration cards in such generous numbers that there are significantly more ration cards in those states than families, and more money has been pumped into lossmaking psus and more money shall be paid to government and public sector employees by way of pay hikes in the near future.

i hope he shuts up. i hope his minders would stick some plaster over his foul mouth.

race and caste

While trying to blog on connections between Dalit struggles and people of color struggles in the U.S. one thing that struck me was the similarities of caste and whiteness; specifically on not seeing one’s own privilege as an upper caste Hindu or as a white person. One thing whites have done in America is try to co-opt movements from people of color and try to make them their own or try to co-opt them by trying to enfold certain leaders from communities of color into the mainstream political fold so only cosmetic changes are done and no real change happens. [...] So too for the Congress Party of India, which for a long time was really the only political party that had control of the Indian government. While Gandhi and the Congress Party claimed to represent the interests of India and to be for all Indians in reality the Congress Party was actually run by upper caste men; while, even though many of whom were more “liberal” minded when it came to religion, they still enjoyed the benefits of caste.

in the second post in 'the spotlight series' on blogbharti, jack stephens of the mustard seed, looks at the similarities between the struggles of the lower castes in india and the people of color in the united states.

the spotlight series

dilip d'souza on being a liberal:

You want to know about being liberal? This woman might have some thoughts. I’ve always thought that one of the things about being liberal is that you live your life as you want and leave others to their lives. Man and woman kissing, hurting nobody — leave them be. But Organizer Lady must think that’s for the crows. Instead, we must foist our values on others, especially if we wear an official-looking badge.

the first in a series of posts, the spotlight series, by articulate and thinking bloggers from a diverse spectrum of worlds in the indian blogworld and outside, at blogbharti.

smart cards: time for a smart dole?

a recent news report:

The Centre is finalising a proposal to use multi-application smart cards with unique IDs for citizens to check largescale illegal immigration and to better target and implement government schemes.

the smart cards can be used in other, much more important, ways too:

"The multi-purpose smart card will help in effective targeting of subsidies and better monitoring of programmes and ensure that fraudulent multiple claims are minimised. It will also help in checking illegal migration in the border areas," said an official.

The need for a multi-purpose national identity card has been felt for purposes as diverse as drawing benefits from government’s flagship schemes like NREGA, getting ration from PDS shops or meeting security concerns.

'effective targeting of subsidies and better monitoring of programmes'? i'd talked about how a straight forward dole would be much more effective than a hundred different varieties of elaborately devised poverty alleviation schemes in this post. and how poor the monitoring of programmes such as the nrega is, in these ( a, b, c) posts. and i'd talked here about how other developing countries like mexico are using variants of the dole to not just supplement the incomes of poor villagers- they're also using them to achieve better spread of education, and to improve women and child care etc., looks like the goi has learnt some important lessons- but has it learnt the most important one? a hundred different schemes run by a hundred different kind of central, state and local government agencies would always mean that the programmes could spring several thousand holes through which funds could leak. why not keep things simple?

why not stick to one smart programme, a dole, instead of making the poor try to prove their identity, their deprivation, their need to several authorities through several kinds of registration, documentation, endorsement and verification, every time a government, at any random level, develops doubts about a certain programme or wants to a introduce new scheme-scam to further its own electoral or other interests? in this context, i'd like to express my agreement with the indian communists- they have always fought against targeting. i've different reasons for endorsing universalization- one smart universal scheme, i believe, would be more effective than several poorly targeted, and even more poorly monitored schemes. one smart scheme, i'm sure, would eliminate the need for all the other schemes. a dole for every rural family could be used to achieve much more than a small reduction in current levels of poverty. as i'd tried to point out in this post, it could also be used to ward off future poverty.

john elliot, writing here, discusses the smart cards too.

no mogambo, no story

a few days ago, times now, the television channel, had broken some wind- here's the gist:

Union health minister A Ramadoss has generated yet another controversy by virtually charging four chief ministers and as many as 150 MPs of lobbying with him for the "powerful tobacco industry"[...]. Speaking in Chennai, he said: "Four CMs and 150 MPs have met me to tell me that they don't want anti-smoking advertisements and labelling of products. Seven CMs wrote to me pleading for the beedi workers and one CM met me three times regarding this."

When TOI contacted Ramadoss, he refused to identify the chief ministers. However, he said: "Where is this country heading towards? Are the lives of 1.1 billion people not more valuable than the livelihood of 30 lakh beedi workers from this kind of work? The powerful tobacco lobby is going all out to ensure the warnings don't appear."

for the next few hours, and a couple of days, the channel tried its utmost to present the news as a major issue that you should be concerned about, and the presenters went on to tell you every few minutes after they were finished disclosing to you the latest on other critical issues such as vengsarkar's writing commitments, the bachchan family's tirth yatras and so on...that the minister was refusing to divulge the names of those wicked politicians who had tried to sabotage the passing of an important piece of legislation..and the minister was still refusing to divulge... well, they were trying as i said, doing everything but standing on their exquisitely manicured hands, to stir up some indignation in our constipated souls..

to check whether their efforts were working, the channel also asked viewers to respond to a question that went something like- do you think ramadoss should disclose the names of the politicians? they also said something about national interest and other prurient interests etc., actually, it'd have taken the reporters/performers not more than a couple of minutes to discover who the politicians were if they had checked their own or the toi's or indiatimes' archives. and found this:

In a day and age when encouraging smoking is politically incorrect, political parties in the state as well as Congress president Sonia Gandhi have become champions of beedi smokers, thanks to the electoral compulsions triggered by the Karimnagar byelection scheduled for December 4.

In the eye of the storm is the recent central directive which made it mandatory for 50 per cent of the beedi packet wrappers to be covered with the statutory warning sign.

and they'd have also found a lot more news coming in from chattisgarh, madhya pradesh, bengal and elswehere about how bidi workers were agitated, and agitating, over the directive. and then they would've found out about how mps from several states had made representations to the health minister and even the prime minister about their concerns..they'd have discovered that there are around 8 million beedi workers in the country, and not 3 millions as the minister says, working, and dying young from, long hard hours with virtually no health or other protection at wages ranging from 20 to 50 rupees a day. most of them are women and young children from obc, dalit and muslim families. and the reporters could've given up their search there. 8 million lower caste, marginalized families- how can so many and such kind of people be stitched together into a powerful, but largely elusive tobacco lobby? would dilute the dramatic interest, right? i mean a small group of dapper suited, mysterious, corporate executives lurking in the shadows of the corridors of power and 8 million families living in neighbourhoods even your maid would find ugly- who'd you cast as mogambo? no mogambo, no story. the channel, you'll notice, has lost its interest in the story. they did check their archives, perhaps, eventually. what does it all mean? it means that politicians are good listeners and presswallahs are bad readers and worse screenwriters.

trade is good...for the poor

i've often wondered why the young/middle aged/old semi-literate bania chugging around the countryside on a rickety auto-trolley, on dirt roads that wouldn't have been there if many others like him hadn't paved them with older, more rickety contraptions, before him, carrying the world, sachetized, to the poor is such a universal target of revilement while the braminized doctor/engineer/babu who's paid to visit the village, but never does, is such an honoured member of indian society. they both serve certain needs- the bania performs his job sincerely while the brahmin uses almost the same rhetoric as that voiced by anti-globalisation protesters in doha and seattle to justify his non-performance. the state supports the doctor and it also supports those who go to jnu to learn to coin new terms of abuse for the bania. for his trade. in an old article, meghnad desai too echoes the view that the bania is a friend of the poor, across the world:

The world as it is now is unequal. In 1975, the OECD countries had around 80 per cent of world GDP. By 2000, that proportion has come down to 70 per cent. And this is what the first world fears. For the first time in the history of capitalism, the metropolis is worried. This is because capital is finding more profitable niches abroad and is prepared to desert the industrialised north. These rich countries must now find jobs for their unskilled male manual workforce. They have to invest in training and to restructure their welfare states. The rich have problems and so they want to slow down the pace of trade liberalisation. They want to impose social and green clauses to stop poor countries exporting.

The WTO meeting in Seattle was the south's opportunity to register its demands. But the exigencies of the US presidential elections and the financial needs of Al Gore's campaign were more important for Clinton than the needs of the third world. So he sabotaged it. The rich will use any excuse to hang on to their privileges - even anti-capitalism.

'worthy but ineffective'

Whether it is called the market, or capitalism, or neoliberalism, it is a tool that has not yet been harnessed fully for poverty alleviation. As Desai points out, the market is a tool for eliminating scarcity. It is departures from the free market, such as big subsidies for agriculture in rich countries, that are doing most to solidify poverty. Even from a tactical perspective, arguments expressed in the language of the free market are listened to, whereas moral sentimentality about excessive inequality is worthy but ineffective.

from an old review of meghnad desai's marx's revenge. seems like an interesting book.

why most indian states should seriously think of seceding from india

THE Green revolution from the late sixties onwards, owing to its markedly greater success in Northern and North western India compared to other parts of the country, had led to increase in the regional concentration of foodgrains output, to a degree of which few are aware. Over a decade ago we had worked out the changing structure of the various regions' contribution to aggregate food output in India for the period 1960-61 to 1987-88 and presented the summarised data in the form of snapshots of three sub-periods, in Table 1. This shows a marked, indeed dramatic shift. Total food output in the regions considered rose by 82 per cent from the early sixties to the mid-eighties. Accounting for just around a quarter (26 per cent) of total food output during 1959-60 to 1961-62 (taking the average of the three years), North and North-Western India had increased its share to two-fifths (39.8 per cent) by the mid-eighties, taking the triennial average for 1983-84 to 1985-86. All other regions of India showed a greater or lesser decline: Eastern India from 23.2 per cent to 20.2 per cent, South India from 21.5 per cent to to 17 per cent and West-central India from 29.1 per cent to 23.1 per cent. Of the addition to grain output during this period, which was 65 million tonnes, nearly 37 million tonnes or over half came came from North India alone.

read ms.utsa patnaik's glib explanation of how this severely distorted growth has been good for india- read and understand that the grotesque edifice of food security in india has been built and rests on growth in a few states in the north and north-west and the concomitant decline in food production across the majority of states! food security at the national level sorely depends on food insecurity in most of the states!

and that is exactly the point i've been trying to make in this series [ (1), (2) and (3) ] of posts. i'd outlined how difficult it is for most indian states to think of producing enough food for all the residents living in any given state. it's not possible because a) the country already produces enough food for everyone, and b) the government distributes surpluses from a few states in all the deficit states so that the total market for local farmers in any given state stands diminished. why should farmers use 100% of the resources at their disposal to produce enough food for 80-90% of the consumption needs in any particular state? any producer would produce only as much as his market demands- in deficit states in india, the government of india ensures that the deficit (5-70% of total consumption needs, across various states) is bridged by bringing in surplus grain from punjab and a couple of other states. so where can the farmers in that state sell their produce if they produce enough for 100% of the consumption needs in that particular state? they can't a) sell in their own state all their produce because the grain sold through the pds takes away 5-70% of their market- their produce can't compete with pds grain on price, and b) they can't sell in other states, because of increased transactional costs, trade restrictions and because their grain, in all probability, would be costlier than grain from surplus states like punjab which have over the years achieved certain economies of scale (i shall touch upon these reasons again, later).

in the final analysis, what the governnment of india does in all the deficit states is to follow precisely the kind of ugly, neo-imperialist strategy that patnaik and sainath and many like them accuse the e.u., and the u.s., of adopting in most of the third world- dumping cheap, subsidized produce and driving the local farmers to suicide.

to survive, any food-deficit indian state needs to produce enough food for all the citizens in that state - it is also necessary for the overall development of the economy of that state that agriculture, and farmers, should be able to grow. that isn't possible for most indian states as long as they remain indian states.

older posts in this series: [1], [2], [3].