It is a bedtime story of economic success, a factory build on a farming land employs more people and generate more income that a poor farmer did. So this story could be labeled Economic Success. But how and who will stand up and call it a rural failure.

“We should be able to meet ends if we had fertile land but people see the factories provide jobs” is what the farmer has to say after is land is taken from him.” All I see is rubbles have replaced our rice fields”

yes “OUR RICE FIELDS” the loss of productive land to roads, cities and golf courses is well known. But the uncontrollable spread of small factories and real estate interventions into rural area, where land is cheap and labor plentiful is a phenomenon has become more common. ‘The Green Revolution’ brought money along with it came the new system, which shattered the way of doing things. Hurting the spiritual side of farming. Rice became a commodity – not a culture. People stop working together. And now in the age of the ‘The Great Concrete Revolution’ the corporate mafias in form of real estate are stealing away the land of the helpless farmer. It is the illusion of modernization that is destroying the bonding between the rich Indian tradition and culture relationship of man in the society with the mother earth - The rites of fertility, the concept of “mother earth” and rebirth in the mother seed, the receptacle of the child like rice soul. The idea of rice souls and ritual ceremonies seems more and more irrational and meaningless. As the soul of the rice is dying over the years so is that of the Indian society with it. It will be not long when the saying of Mahatma Gandhi “The True India lives in the villages” will have to be rephrased as “The True India had become a slave of the corporate human mind”

BHAAT :: A search for a sustainable alternatives to the ‘current frenzy of Development and Industrialization’ in India which can fulfill the most basic needs of common man - food and water..

Tuesday, 29 November 2011

RICE :: INDIA


The net area sown is nearly 142 M ha, of which only 51 percent is irrigated, while the gross cropped area is approximately 189 M ha. There are about 106 million operational holdings with an average size of 1.57 ha. About 78 percent of the holdings are less than 2 ha, belonging to small and marginal farmers, and cover 32 percent of the total cultivated area. 44.6 M ha in rice, of the total rice area, only 51 percent is irrigated, so 49 percent is rainfed. 
Rice :: Area, production and productivity in India

Rice versus total grain production in India


India :: rice production from 1980 -2006

 India :: fertilizer use in rice production from 1980 -2006


In parallel developments, by the early 1990s the widespread planting of the semidwarf HYVs and hybrid rices in densely planted areas of Asia amounted to about 72 million hectares. These HYVs share a common semidwarf gene (sd1) and largely the same cytoplasm (either from "China" in older HYVs or "Wild Abortive" in the hybrids). This poses a serious threat of production losses due to a much narrowed genetic base if wide-ranging pest epidemics should break out, as was the case with hybrid maize in the United States during 1970—1 (Chang 1984).



(Green revolution) Since the early 1970s, poorly educated rice farmers in South and Southeast Asia have planted the same HYV in successive crop seasons and have staggered plantings across two crops. Such a biologically unsound practice has led to the emergence of new and more virulent biotypes of insect pests and disease pathogens that have overcome the resistance genes in the newly bred and widely grown HYVs. The result has been heavy crop losses in several tropical countries in a cyclic pattern (Chang and Li 1991; Chang 1994).







West Bengal(15.5%), was the largest rice producer followed by Uttar Pradesh(13.5%), Andhra Pradesh(13.3%), Punjab(9.2%), Tamil Nadu(9.6%), Bhir(7.7%), Orissa(6.3%) and Madhya Pardesh (6.2%)
Rice –INDIA -2000
India produces 22.40 % of the world rice second to China 31.76% during 2000
Rice is the single most important food grain; it occupies 36% of the gross cropped area and accounts for 42% of the total food-grain production in India during 2000-01. More than 50 percent of country’s population depends fully or partially on rice as it constitutes the main cereal food crop of the diet. During 1999-2000, in the states like Andhra Pradesh, Assam, Kerala, Orissa, Tamil Nadu and West Bengal, rice consumption accounted for more than 80 percent share in total cereal intake.

Along the Malabar Coast of southwestern India. For millions rice is the chief dish, if not the only dish, at every meal. Rice originated in a tropical, very rainy, marshy country. Today there are more than 2400 varieties including about 1000 in India alone -- special strains adapted to local differences in soil, temperature and rainfall.

The eastern Indian states of Uttar Pradesh, Chattisgarh, Bihar, Jharkhand, Assam, West Bengal, and Orissa are the major rice-growing areas, accounting for about half of the total rice production in the country. Much of this production is carried out under rain fed conditions. It is estimated that about 10 percent of foodgrains produced in India, are lost in processing and storage. It has been reported that about 9 percent of paddy is lost due to use of old and outdated methods of drying and milling, improper and unscientific methods of storage, transport and handling. It has been estimated that total post harvest losses of paddy at producers’ level was about 2.71 percent of total production. 

With rising costs in labor, chemicals, fuel, and water, the farmers in irrigated areas will be squeezed between production costs and market price. The latter, dictated by government pricing policy in most countries, remains lower than the real rice price (David 1991). Meanwhile, urbanization and industrialization will continue to deprive the shrinking farming communities of skilled workers, especially young men. Such changes in rice-farming communities will have serious and widespread socioeconomic implications.


Rice :: Export from India 



In early 2008, India imposed export bans on non-basmati rice or restrictions to protect the domestic consumers.
Posted by TAMASHA MOTION PICTURES
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