Indra’s Drishtikona (Viewpoint)

A news item from Times of India
5 docs, lawyer & designer make it to IIM-C
Jhimli Mukherjee Pandey | TNN

Kolkata: When postgraduate classes start at the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, on June 23, there’s a surprise in store. Five doctors, a lawyer and a fashion designer are among those who have made it to the 2008 batch and IIM-C old timers say that this is perhaps the first time that the institute has received such a variety.
The five doctors feel being a manager is a more lucrative job, what with the cushy working conditions and huge salaries that an IIM degree automatically commands. But the lawyer and fashion designer say they will stick to their core areas and feel the IIM education will enhance
their potential and help them understand market dynamics.
Balkrishna, one of the doctors who will join the IIM-C, feels that in the field of medicine one just ‘‘mugs textbooks and stores information to be used later’’. ‘‘There’s hardly any use of one’s intelligence. One just has to remember and reproduce. Not my kind of job,’’ he said.
‘‘If I have to make a name for myself in the field of medicine, I would have to study for another 10 years before even starting practice, which I don’t want to do. Instead, an MBA degree will immediately get me a neat salary and great working conditions. I know that people will ask me why I wasted my time studying medicine. But the same applies to those engineers who have been chucking their core training to become MBAs for so many years now,’’ said Mudit Sharma, who got his MBBS degree in 2007.

Posted by: Indra at 05/10/2008 @ 6:08 pm for entry B -Schools Causing Inequity

Mukund Kumar contributed this
This one from Norman Uphoff.

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Norman Uphoff
Date: 19 Apr 2008 01:14
Subject: RE: [se-food] Query: Systemic Rice Intensification (SRI) - Experiences. Reply by 26 April 2008
To: Food and Nutrition Security Community

Moderator’s Note: We thank Prabhat Kumar for facilitating this response from Norman Uphoff. We look forward to further inputs from our members to this query on ‘Systemic Rice Intensification.

Dear members,

Prabhat Kumar at AIT has shared with me some recent communications on SRI, and I would like to add some thoughts to the discussion in response to Bamji’s queries.

Regarding success stories, the most evident one is in Tripura state of India, where thanks to the leadership of an agricultural scientist in the DOA, Dr. Baharul Majumdar (imbaharul@yahoo.com) there has been very rapid spread in the past several years. Baharul first learned about SRI in 2000, and the first report he had on it, a many-times photocopied paper, was so faint he said that he had to take a pencil to write in some of the words to understand it.

Baharul spent two years trying out the methods himself, because he was understandably skeptical at the beginning. He also had to work out some adaptations for the very humid conditions of Tripura state (average rainfall is 2500 mm), particularly placement of drainage channels across the length of the field every 8 or 9 rows. He got 44 farmers to try the methods in 2002, and by 2005 had raised this number to 880. At this point he had both confidence and evidence, and got the Secretary of Agriculture, and then the Minister of Agriculture, and finally the Chief Minister all to come see SRI fields and talk with SRI farmers themselves. This persuaded the political leadership (which had made a pledge to make Tripura self-sufficient in grains, which means mostly rice, by 2010, without any good way to achieve this goal — five years of trying conventional Green Revolution technologies had made hardly a dent in the rice deficit) to give SRI support.

Baharul was given one-third of the state’s agricultural budget for 2005-2006, and by great personal efforts, and with cooperation of DOA staff and particularly PR institutions, the number of SRI users went from <1,000 to >30,000 in one year, and up to >70,000 the next year (2007). At this point, WWF sent a delegation from AP and other states to visit Tripura, to understand what was going on, and it then organized the 2nd national SRI symposium in Agartala in October 2007. I was fortunate to be able to attend, and attached is report of the symposium and then of the village visits. This will give everyone a good idea of the SRI experience across India (27 states or territories were represented among the 250+ participants) and specifically within Tripura.

The question of whether SRI can be ‘universally adopted’ is the wrong question, since SRI is not a technology to be adopted (transferred), but rather a set of insights, concepts and principles to be adapted to local conditions. Kumar expressed this very well in his response. But we see wide variation in the agroecological conditions to which these principles can be adapted. In Nepal, SRI has made improvements in rice production from almost sea level in the terai (Morang district), with doubled yield, up to 2,500 meters around Humla, with sufficient improvement (and cost reduction) to interest farmers. (Under adverse conditions, one won’t get the same kind of response.)

Moreover, we see great variation in response to rainfall conditions. Separately, I will send a report from Mali, from the Timbuktu region on the edge of the Sahara Desert, where they got a 9 t/ha yield in their first evaluation last year — completely the opposition environment from rain-saturated Tripura state. Laos is more like Tripura, and I will attach a recent article from there showing a doubled yield. I recently received a report from the team of PRADAN, an excellent NGO, working in Purulia district of West Bengal, where there is little irrigation for very poor communities. There, starting with just 4 farmers in 2003, the number has grown to over 3,000, with average yield over 7 t/ha — rainfed. Or see the results obtained in three years of evaluations in the Punjab, where the problem is a rapidly falling water table that will lead to the demise of irrigated agriculture in central Punjab soon at present rates of extraction.

The question was raised about labor-intensity. It is interesting that in China, where there are over 100,000 ha of SRI rice this past season in both Sichuan and Zhejiang provinces, up from maybe 20,000 ha in each two years before, the main reason farmers give for taking up SRI concepts and practices is — labor-saving. Chinese farmers, being imaginative and industrious, have taken the ideas and figured out how to reduce labor requirements — along with seed, water and cash requirements.

Studies by IWMI’s India programme and by TNAU in 2004 both calculated an 8% reduction in labor required per hectare, with increases in yield, the first study being of rainfed SRI (Purulia district) and the latter of irrigated SRI (Tamiraparani basin). So SRI is more labor-intensive for many farmers, and in the first season while there is a learning process going on it will usually require more labor. But most farmers, some very quickly, convert the 80-90% reduction in plant population into a plus for saving labor.

With no flooding, there is need for weed control. And it amazes me that some farmers find the cono weeder or rotary hoe a godsend, saying saves them time and makes weeding much easier on the body, and others complain bitterly about what a chore the weeding is. I don’t know how to assess this. Weeding is a task that practically no farmers enjoy, but we have evidence that good (soil-aerating) weeding with a mechanical weeder can add 1, 2, even 3 t/ha to yield, making this investment of labor very paying.

So, the bottom line I come up with is that SRI has a lot of objective evidence to support its productivity and desirability, but there is a huge subjective, attitudinal factor, which deserves more study. Maybe with the expanding use of SRI in Tripura, this would be a good place for people from many parts of India to visit and learn from this experience, working mostly with farmers that are not very well educated, and poorer, many of the SC or ST households.

When Baharul showed his pictures from the first SRI national symposium, held in Hyderabad in 2006, one could almost hear sighs of amazement when participants saw the beautiful, orderly and productive fields of rice being grown by tribal farmers with SRI methods, some farmers who were not even doing row planting two years before, now managing large, well laid-out and prosperous fields. People from AP who had been complaining about how difficult SRI was for their farmers had to rethink their pessimism when they saw what Tripura counterparts were accomplishing.

So, SRI is a very human innovation and a very human story. I am glad to know that there is so much interest and so much conversation going on. In Tamilnadu, they are up to 4.3 lakhs of SRI this season according to the Minister of Agriculture. Why other states in India are so lagging behind Tripura and Tamilnadu is itself a very interesting question, which Indians can answer better than me.

Norman Uphoff

Cornell University

New York

Posted by: Indra at 05/02/2008 @ 10:20 pm for entry Nitish Kumar and Bihar