The media space is overflowing with data and information from both official sources and knowledgeable circles among the country’s literati relating to its state of health in various sectors with agriculture sector rightly being bestowed spotlight. The more articulate flock among them have not only created many indices and ratios to compress the vast data but also invariably present them for enlightening their captive audiences including moderates, optimists, pessimists, critics of administration, detractors of the government and a relatively small number of lay people. These exercises focussed on the current goings on in the land and taking calls on its movement in years ahead keeps the well-oiled machinery called intelligentsia debating in symposiums, conferences and seminars, both at national and regional levels, ostensibly to prescribe to the successive governments appropriate policies and even plan of action in the country’s best interests.

Even as the rustics find themselves between the devil and the deep sea as it were, battling with droughts year on year in some regions of the land, including Karnataka’s many districts and floods in many of its other parts, the urbanites are sticking to their agenda of pursuing fanciful living style, not necessarily to mean improving life style, marked by rising pressures on the many shrinking resources, particularly land and water.

One cannot but talk of land and water needed by urban residents and the village folk with mutually opposing perspective. For the former population, these two gifts of nature are mere commodities while for the latter, they are their only assets. Needless to remark that the urban ethos on the aforementioned commodities, particularly the monetary value attached to them continues to be devastating as the goings on in the real estate sector provides unassailable testimony. The intimate I-can’t-be-without-you (avinaabhaava) connect between the rustics and land as well as water has got fractured due to obvious reasons, such as unrewarding returns, paucity of agriculture labour, rising costs of inputs for raising crops, unbridled corruption stalling the reach of benefits to the target groups among the farming fraternity and so on.

The pointers to rural distress are clear considering the current monthly income of most of the families in the country’s villages being a fraction of the income of their urban counterparts, the headcount of the workforce engaged on farming has shrunk to 200 million. The days ahead are sure to witness a grim scenario unless the rustics are facilitated to increase their family income and decrease rural distress.