What Am I

The focus of my trip to this village near Rajahmundry was to understand the problems that farmers face: For the ease of assessment I classified the agricultural workers into four categories. a) A farmer who owns a land b) A farmer who doesn't own a land c) A farmer depending on cattle d) Agricultural Labour In this edition of the series, I will focus on the problems faced a), b) mentioned above. Typically people who belong to the forward caste take-up and continue to remain in farming. Many perceived lower communities have less bonding to agriculture and easily switch to other professions. (Hence as I mentioned earlier caste is a major driving force in farming community). With Govt. allotting land to all the sections of the society, the following issues remain true to each farmer independent of their caste/creed. Category Parameter Problems associated with each Parameter Commercial Aspects Revenue a)     The inherent nature of conventional a...

Apart from the well known fact that more than 100,000 farmers have died in India in the past decade alone, did you know that the.. Per capita income for a farmer from Paddy is ~Rs30,000/- per crop? Cost of capital for a farmer varies anything from 24-75% per annum? While the cost of drilling a bore is Rs40,000-50,000/-, the cost of installation of a motor and getting access for power to that motor costs another Rs1-1.5 lacs? If a person has less than one acre of land holding, he cannot even drill a bore? Much of the farming society doesn't own any farming land? Caste drives the farming activities in India? The debt write offs mentioned by Govt. impact only 10-15% of the total farming community? In spite of the wide-spread un-employment there is a dearth of labour available to a farmer? Farming as an activity has the highest attrition rates? Minimum support price offered to the farmers doesn't include the travel costs, and those costs are to be borne by the farmer hims...

Introduction The recent increase in the rapes have made me just do a survey on the performance of various states/cities about the crimes committed in them. A comparison of Rapes that have happened in various states in 2008 is tabulated below. The summary of the table is: a)     MP has the dubisous record of highest number of rapes committed b)     AP is the worst performer in the Southern states which on an overall basis seem to be secure places for women c)     Mizoram has the highest per capita rapes i.e. the number of rapes per million women population. Many North Eastern States have fared bad. d)     Delhi, has more rapes than the states which have almost 4 times its population. Before I jump to any conclusion on the best place to reside, rather the worst place to reside, I thought it would be fair to judge the performance of various cities and then get an overall idea. Here is the performance of vari...

I was just trying to understand the various numbers that came around in news. So, I put some of them in descending order, and the results are in the table below: Scenario Amount (Rs) USA Fiscal deficit (FY10) 92,500,000,000,000 China's reserves (FY10) 90,000,000,000,000 US bail out package (FY08) 40,500,000,000,000 2G Spectrum scam (FY10) 1,750,000,000,000 India's defence expenditure (FY10) 1,433,440,000,000 Compensation paid to BP oil spill in Gulf of Mexico - Till Date 135,000,000,000 Mukesh Ambani's home (FY10) 80,000,000,000 Compensation paid to Bhopal Gas Tragedy (FY01) 21,150,000,000 Loss due to power procured from dabhol power plant (FY01) 10,806,555,000 Profit of Reddy brothers per day (FY11) 170,000,000 Bonus to a typical i-banker in Wall Street (FY11) 40,000,000 ...