[FREE REPORT] Economic Planning and Ecological Perilsby Ananya Singh | 27-08-2020 02:09 |
|---|
 Just recently I was reading a book titled "Everybody Loves a Good Drought" by Magasaysay Award winning rural journalist Dr. P. Sainath. The book documents the many stories of misery, malady, and dearth from some of the poorest districts of India. But what arrested my attention was the first chapter of the book which deals with a story from my state, Odisha. Dr. Sainath shares a story about an artificial insemination program named "Samanwita" that was started around 1978. The scheme's agenda included : 1. Free lands to be given to grow Subabul trees to feed the cattle 2. The Government was to offer minimum wage to the poor farmers for working on these "free" lands 3. Local cows to be impregnated with Jersey semen so as to deliver several high-yield milch cows The district chosen for this was Nuapada which was then a milk-surplus district and hence, didn't substantiate the need of a dairy project there. The residents of Komna village in Nuapada blindly followed the administration's lofty, far from reality, and extremely ambitious project by not only breeding the imported Jersey breed of cattle with the local cows, but also by preventing local cows from crossing with the indigenous 'Khariar breed' bulls by castrating the bulls. The bulls went almost extinct, and the yield from the cows, too, declined drastically. The loss of cattle has been to the tune of Rs. 30 lakhs a year. The artificially bred varieties were only 8 in number and died immediately without producing even a drop of milk. Now, the once dairy-surplus land is bereft of dairy products and is desperately looking to buy Khariar Bulls from elsewhere to breed with the local cows. Moreover, the subabul trees vanished from the area and what was left behind was arid, infertile land. The Government took back its lands and ended the minimum wage programme within a few months seeing the failure of the scheme. As a consequence, people were now without land, food crop, job, and milching animals. They had lost their livelihoods to an extremely vague and senseless scheme. The Comptroller and Auditor General of India's "test audit" noted that about Rs. 3 crores was spent on establishing 250 artificial insemination centres that didn't work for the weaker sections of the community but rather ended up squandering funds and causing ecological imbalance. Trees died, animals became extinct. For what ? The distance between the planners and the beneficiaries, here, was the roadblock for development and the chief conspirator behind this environmental disaster. The administration must converge its far-fetched schemes with ground zero reality. Green and sustainable development is the need of the hour.
|
