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Green Revolution First!
I think some of us tend to forget that we are still one of the poorest countries in the world. Our GDP is around US$40 billion and if we do the per capita thing, then it's less than US$ 1,500.
Yes, the idea of grabbing a laptop and staying on top of Kirtipuray Dada and earning 3 lakhs a month is possible someday but for now, we need to focus on baas, gaas and kaapas which has always been the core mission of our successive governments who have failed to do their duty and instead enriched the lives of their cousins, civil servants and contractors.
Today, let us focus on the 'gaas' thing. Yes, our dal-bhat diet is the most balanced in the world. That's what our health experts tell us now and then, but we import most of our bhaat and dal and even buffaloes and goats and every other produce we consume.
We import billions of dollars in grains, vegetables, and more every year, and instead of working toward food self-sufficiency, we are still dependent on other countries. Even our farmers don't get fertilizers on time and don't get paid on time by the bigger players either. And then we have our middlemen who seem to make 500% profit while farmers get a few paisa and sometimes far less than their production costs.
India was successful with its Green Revolution in the late 60s, and by the 80s, it was self-sufficient and even exporting its grains and vegetables abroad. We need to work on this first. We need to ask the Indians how they did it, but when it comes to innovation, we need to look towards the Dutch. The folks in the Netherlands seem to do pretty well when it comes to exporting agricultural products all over the world, and they seem to be number two behind the US when it comes to land size and their agricultural production.
Dutch greenhouses have revolutionized modern farming and have managed to reduce water consumption and the use of chemical pesticides as well. I think we can call it our 'greenhouse' revolution, and in a decade, we will be not only self-sufficient but also exporting our agricultural products all over the world.
Hope our new government will look into this and make better use of our fertile lands in the plains and also our hilly region, where we can be exporting high-quality tea and coffee and other produce as well.
We are self-sufficient when it comes to chickens and eggs but everybody is scratching their heads trying to figure out why a single egg costs almost Rs 20 in the retail market, while across the border, it is around Rs 11. We were a food-exporting nation forty years ago, but we don't know what happened in the past three decades that we have become a major food-importing nation.
We all know what happened but let us not talk about the past anymore. It is useless and a waste of time to whine about what they didn't do then. We have a new government in town and let us hope that they will plan something big to make use of our land and minimize the outflow of our hard-earned money buying Chinese apples and Indian vegetables and grains. I say, Go Dutch and get their investment, give them tax breaks, adapt their technology and innovation and let us finally be able to afford our own grains and vegetables and other agricultural products and make billions of Dollars in exports and reduce our trade deficit as well!
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