It is also about people, issues and new strategies!
Yes, the very country’s varied demands are all part of the total growth, not just agriculture or industry.
The latest interest in climate change is one such latest development. Climate change control concerns everybody and farmers and farming sector needs much sensitisation and sensitivity.
Natural forces impact agriculture more than any other sector of the economy.
So, this is one area where many can help the agri sector.
Then comes the biotechnology applications. There is now a prejudice against agri biotechnology products, specially, the Bt Brinjal.
So, readers will see in this issue all the latest news concerning the topic.
But we need to tell the readers that as a media company which had brought out the India’s first survey on biotechnology research and industry way back in the year 1985 or there about, we have a duty to tell the readers what our position is.
Biotechnology is a latest science and it has spawned a revolutionary industry, from medicines to new products in food, environment protection to other areas.
Can we live without anti-biotics? Without the very many life saving drugs?
So too the genetically-modified organisms of many types.
GM food is one new thing. Now GM cotton has taken over the traditional cotton seeds variety.
We have published in this issue a special feature on the MNC, the much maligned Monsanto. We request our readers to go through that essay carefully and give us your views on what you consider the positive and the negative side of the story. After all the company had been there for a century and it has really done something pioneering and its efforts require some objective recognition.
All this doesn’t mean that we have to accept all its views or its products.
Civil society awareness and vigilance is very critical for a healthy society and for a healthy food regime and therefore we welcome the current widely debated concerns and maybe we require some more time before we can decide the food articles from the GM regime.
But we can’t go the whole way as some of the more jealous and sometimes very negative mindset displayed by some of our high profile, sometimes arm-chair agitators and even obstructers of any progress on the agriculture front.
Agriculture through pure and only organic way or through natural farming is not viable or pragmatic either.
But this doesn’t mean the natural, green route to farming and to many other social and economic needs like, say, renewable energy or solar and wind energy options needn’t be pursued. In fact, we have to devise many policies and institutional mechanisms and even well-thought out subsidies need to be brought out.
The pity is that in our current urban-centric and even, shall we say, the bureaucratic centric governance to which Dr.Singh has become an adherent, more out of fears for his own tenure at the PMO, that from any inner convictions, wee in India seem to be surrendered to an artificial polity and society.
For instance, the Pm talks of nuclear energy as an option. But is he honest to ask himself if not say to his countrymen, that nuclear energy is fraught with multiple issues, from civil to military applications, from safety to the long gestation period etc.
So, to talk of nuclear energy as a priory is both dishonest and certainly not serving the unfortunate countrymen, the unfortunate in the rural and weaker sections. An energy option that has a 20-40 yea horizon and other energies, renewable to even coal, still the dominant sources, that has a time scale of say immediate to very short term advantages is clearly a moral issue and a moral commitment.
Who care for such moralities when expediency and survival is our current priorities!
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