Watering the farms

Watering the farms:
Learning from the people

Paddy farming in Konkan

 Paddy farming needs plenty of water. Even during monsoon the farmers need water management during different events of farming actions.

While watering their farms, the farmers traditionally use simple, commonsense techniques. They use various implements to lift water from wells or streams for irrigation, which work by human energy and/or bull energy. Now some use pumps that work on diesel or electricity.
Before pouring the water in the troughs or channels dug in the farms, they prepare cow dung slurry in water, and spread it in the beginning stretch of the channel. That helps to seal the pores in the channel and thus prevents water loss by percolation right in the beginning, thus it assures that water reaches to the end of the farm.

Theories of economics, or politics, or democracy may sound and seem glamorous, but the instruments of application matter. Richard P. Feynman, Nobel Prize winner in physics, is quoted by DR. Judah Kahn, to have said: “I was asked to assist in the creation of the world’s most destructive machine but I was never asked how to use it. Now I realize what I have done and the machine could do, and I am afraid” (Richard P. Feynman, ‘Don’t you have time to think?’ Ed. Michelle Feynman, Penguin, 2005, p. 361). Feynman died by cancer. (Was it due to the atomic radiation?) He was deeply interested in the mysteries of Nature, in the compartment of Physics, and perhaps missed Biology – his own body.

In modern society, while intellect takes topmost level, body – individual or the collective – is neglected, exploited, and oppressed. This is evident at national, regional and global levels in a great mass of human body of the underclass, the other living beings and the Earth; the corporate flourish. Do the numbers or statistics — one or one million, ten percent or ninety percent — matter, except for those who sit in the chambers, or move in a grove, or fly high and don’t see beyond their eyelids?

Unfortunately much of the resources – cash or kind, education or skills, which may be appropriate to 21st century – that are meant for the target groups on the lowest economic rungs are absorbed by the administrative channels of the governments; a known secret. Indeed, it is similar in nature to irrigation by pump sets, where water is wasted because of high velocity and volume, which is not controlled. It is high time, the governments learn from the people, and find the ways to plug the dissipation of resources. And please stop treating these people as second class citizens and beneficiaries until the next round of elections.

Sadly, it seems Indian Democracy has lost its sense of proportion and priorities for last six decades, which claims to be a ‘developing nation’, of course at the cost of the Third World India (and the Fourth World India) that only benefits the First World India. We only hope the “PAYBACK TIME’ comes soon.

Late News: Where do the money go? Read: Flood Fraud - January 12, 2007.
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Remigius de Souza

(02-10-06)