Agrochemical Industry and Agriculture: Together but Still Apart

The World Bank’s policies are still supporting the agro chemical industry in a major way. Between 1993 to 1995, the Bank approved US$56.9 million worth of contracts for pesticides and agrochemicals.

Six companies are associated with US$3 million or more in Bank-approved agrochemical sales over the three year period between FY 93-95: Rhone Poulenc (France), BASF (Germany), Zeneca (UK), Sumitomo (Japan), FMC Corp. (US), Helm (Germany). Another five were to receive US$1-3 million: Bayer (Germany), Roussel Uclaf (France), Cyanamid (US), Air Lloyd (Germany), and Hoescht (Germany). The company at the top of this list, Rhone Poulenc in France, was the big winner in terms of sales. In FY93-95 it stood to make US$18.6 million, or 33% of the value of all Bank-approved contracts benefiting the G-7 agrochemical industry. In addition, the Bank hired, through its Executive Exchange program, a senior staff member from Rhone Poulenc.

 

Two of the Pesticide Action Network’s “Dirty Dozen” pesticides appear in these contracts: paraquat and DDT. Contracts to French and German companies support the procurement of almost US$120,000 of paraquat for two Bank projects in Nigeria.

 

Paraquat is a highly toxic chemical that can cause death in moderate concentrations and which is used as an agent of suicide in developing countries. It is banned in nine countries; in the US, it is restricted to use by trained applicators or persons under their direct supervision.DDT is banned for all uses in 49 countries, is severely restricted in 23 others, and has been found to disrupt the normal functioning of the endocrine system. Again, a French company stood to gain almost US$880,000 from the supply of 250 tons of DDT for use in a Bank-financed health sector project in Madagascar.

Posted by Dinesh Singh Rawat

An online research journalist

Green Revolution in India: What’s Reality And How Real

In India the World Bank joined forces with the U.S. Agency for International Development starting in the 1960s to promote the “green revolution” and import fertilizer, seeds, pesticides and farm machinery.

In 1969, the Terai Seed Corporation was started with a US$13 million World Bank loan. This was followed by two National Seeds Project (NSP) loans.

 

This program led to the homogenization and corporatization of India’s agricultural system. The Bank provided NSP with US$41 million between 1974 and 1978. The projects were intended to develop state institutions and to create a new infrastructure for increasing the production of green revolution seed varieties.

 

In 1988, the World Bank gave India’s seed sector a fourth loan to make it more “market responsive.” The US$150 million loan aimed to privatize the seed industry and open India to multinational seed corporations.

 

Yet a study by the World Resources Institute, published in 1994, showed that the Green Revolution only increased Indian food production by 5.4% while the environmental degradation it has caused has raised serious worries.

 

Thus although the cultivated area increased by seven percent because of double cropping on irrigated farms, some 8.5 million hectares or six percent of the crop base was lost to waterlogging, salinity or excess alkalinity.

Although the amount of wheat doubled over the period of 20 years, rice production went up 50% and production of commercial crops like sugarcane and cotton went up, this increase in cultivation of these crops came at the expense of crops like chickpeas and millet, crops grown by the poor for themselves.

 

Posted by Dinesh Singh Rawat

An online Research Journalist

Winning Shot is all about Dinesh Singh Rawat Thoughts and actions

Winning shot is my online mind graph. What I write or refer on any particular day reflect my mood and mind interpretation of ideas and issues surrounding me. So please read my each and every blog as complete independent from others. Than you can  enjoy these.

Dinesh Singh Rawat
an online research journalist

Citizen Journalism an Innovative and Powerful Tool to Knowledge Based Society

Citizen journalism an innovative and powerful tool to knowledge based society Information is the basis of knowledge. When any information we know is processed and lodged in our minds became knowledge. We are rapidly proceeding towards knowledge society in information era. To acquire verities of knowledge on different subjects, the future dreamed knowledge society will require multi levels information delivery systems. The Contemporary media and other information channels and sources could not alone meet the demands of information, so knowledge societal ethics ask every citizen to contribute his or her share to make this society reality.

In contemporary journalism gate keepings are done at every level in name of editorial reviews, and premium membership. But citizen journalism is trying to remove all such gate keepings from journalism because in knowledge society every citizen is a torch carrier of information. In true spirit lesser gate keeping will be the guarantee of high valued citizen journalism .Knowledge society can not will be developed in computers or other electronics gadgets but only and only in human minds, so without equal participations of each and every minds, big or small. We couldn’t dream of our future .The free, fair and fast (3F) 4 all should be the main ethics of citizen journalism.

To understand the definition and scope of citizen journalism one should go to the roots of traditional journalism. The journalism was developed and lived with human from Stone Age to computer age but its nature and scope were different in every age of human development. In stone age journalism was in form of verbal intra personal as requirements of that age were geographical and anatomical .

Than came the mechanical/technological age, when wheel started to turned the development of mankind, in this age print and electronic journalism had made its presence because machine produced products made free economics traveling around the world cutting across the geographical barriers.

The information era popularly called information revolution, knowledge based society will be its bio product. To meet the future demand of information revolution, journalism has to change its contemporary form to basics, from where it had started participation of all as it were in Stone Age when every human had to act as journalist to make information flow in his or her society.

Again in information revolution every citizen has to make his or her informatory contribution. The citizen journalism has emerged as an innovative and powerful tool for common citizens to deliver their shares in shaping knowledge based society in or around them.

 

Dinesh Singh Rawat

Citizen Journalism is Future Mass Communication

 Mass communication has been always a fast changing subject from verbal to print, and print to electronics to online। The participants in different phases of mass communication journey were remained same i।e। Special class, which called themselves as forth pillar of democracy mean journo.

Every medium and media has remained fully depended on their feeds. There is no doubt that their have made excellent contributions in development in every spheres of lives. But in knowledge revolution era mass communication is demanding more feeds and information which can not be provided alone by our journalists fraternity so active participation of citizens are require to meet the expectations.

This active participation of citizens in mass communication delivery system is now named as citizen journalism or citizen journalist. In this process for future mass communication delivery system some serious researchers have working hard. In them are young mass communication researchers from developing nation India.

Education And Developing India

India.s recent economic growth rates have generated much optimism about its general social and economic development. But has there been accompanying progress in indicators of educational outcomes? How good are Indian educational achievements in relation to China.s, the country withwhich it is increasingly compared? What are the most significant developments in Indian school education and what has been the impact of various education policy initiatives? This paper presents a critical overview of the school education sector in India using newly released data and a survey of existing studies.

The story of India.s educational achievements is one of mixed success. On the down side, India has 22 per cent of the world.s population but 46 per cent of the world.s illiterates, and is home to a high proportion of the world.s out of school children and youth.

 On the positive side, it has made encouraging recent progress in raising schooling participation. While the base of India.s education pyramid may be weak, it has emerged as an important player in the worldwide information technology revolution on the back of substantial (absolute) numbers of well educated computing and other graduates.

Indian educational achievements in international perspective

Table 1 presents India.s adult and youth literacy rates alongside equivalent figures for its regional neighbours, as well as for countries in the BRIC grouping (Brazil, Russian Federation, India and China). While India does well compared to Bangladesh and Pakistan, it lags substantially behind all the other BRIC countries and Sri Lanka. Indeed it is striking that its overall adult literacy rate is similar to and female adult literacy rate lower than that of Sub Saharan Africa.

 The comparison with China is of particular interest and it shows India to be at a considerable educational disadvantage:

India.s adult literacy in the early 2000s was wholly 30 percentage points below China.s. Even  focusing more narrowly at only the youth literacy rates, India.s disadvantage with respect to China is a large 22.5 percentage points.

India.s disadvantage vis a vis other countries in primary school participation rates is much smaller compared to that for youth literacy rates, since 93.4% of Indian elementary school age children were enrolled in school in 2006 according to ASER survey (Pratham, 2007). However, as

Figure 1 shows, at the secondary school level, India is again at a large disadvantage with respect to all three other BRIC countries where secondary enrolment rates are far above those predicted for countries at their levels of per capita GDP. Brazilian and Russian secondary school net enrolment rates are 27 percentage points higher than India.s. Figure 2 shows that India is more than 30 years behind China in terms of the proportion of the population with completed secondary and post secondary schooling.

Table 1

Adult and youth literacy rates

Adult Literacy rates (15+ year olds) Youth Literacy rates (15-24 year olds)

                Total  male  female  Total  male  female

Bangladesh   42.6 51.7  33.1     51.5    59.4   43.1

Pakistan      49.9  63.0  36.0     65.5    75.8   54.7

Sri Lanka     90.7 92.3   89.1     95.6    95.1   96.1

India          61.0 73.4   47.8      76.4    84.2   67.7

China         90.9 95.1   86.5      98.9    99.2   98.5

Brazil          88.6 88.4  88.8      96.8    95.8    97.9

Russian       99.4 99.7 99.2       99.7    99.7    99.8

World         82.2 87.2 77.3        87.3    90.5    84.1

Developing countries 76.8 83.5 70.1 84.8 88.6 80.9

Sub-Saharan Africa 61.2 69.5 53.3 72.9 77.8 68.3

Source: 2000-2004 data from the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, UNESCO (2006).

NowPublic

Tags: India | Education | Opinions

Winning Shot

It’s all about the thoughts and actions of an online research journalist Dinesh singh Rawat.

clipped from news.bbc.co.uk The deputy mayor of the Indian capital Delhi died on Sunday after being attacked by a horde of wild monkeys. SS Bajwa suffered serious head injuries when he fell from the first-floor terrace of his home on Saturday morning trying to fight off the monkeys. The city has long struggled to counter its plague of monkeys, which invade government complexes and temples, snatch food and scare passers-by. The High Court demanded the city find an answer to the problem last year.

India is waiting at 2081 AD.

As population of any state increase so as more and more manpower is available for that particular state or country. But in India this simple rule is going against.

In this ancient land of world according to 1991 census the population of this land was approx.82crores. The main work force among population was 34.118%.

This simply means that one Indian was working for three others non-active persons. In contrast to this statistics as per census of 2001 total population of India was 1027015247.out of this only 30.49% were main workers.

 

In last 10 years 1991-2001, percentage of main workers among total population has come down from 34.18% to 30.18%. The clear cut 3.69% decline is number of workers.

 

The major reasons to this shortcoming in now availability of jobs. We have chosen the specific time period (i.e. 1991-2001) as new economical reforms or liberalization of economy was started in year 1991 by then finance minister Dr.Man Mohan Singh to 2001, in times of BJP disinvestments period (feel good era).

 

What these so called reforms & others new economical policies did effect on jobs availability in this peninsular country. The open eye investigation by ABC news team revealed the eye opening facts about it.

 

As per 1991 census only 34.18% of total populations were main workers among males, 51% of them were main workers. As in female side only 16.03% of total female populations were in working battery of nation.

 

The above statistics showed considerably down trend in 2001 census where total percentage of worker among population come down sharply from 51% to 45.27% means 5.73% decline. In this contrast woman jobs are also decreased but slightly from 16.03% to 14.66% means decrease of 1.66%.

 

The reasons behind these are new industrial environment in India’s and huge increment of population.

 

The population of county is increasing at the rate of 20.18% per decades compare to this the job opportunities in this part of world are decreasing at the rate of 3.69% per ten years. This clearly indicates that any increase in India’s populations directly proportional to the percentage of jobs left of future generations.

 

The new economic order in country has added fuel in this problem since 1947 India had taken path of socialism under congress govt. center. All economical decisions were taken keeping the idea of socialism. But the year 1991 was path-breaking year in which this social state started to move towards capitalist order. The economy was so called liberalized (liberalized) the political circle started favoring the management’s. The labour rights started marginalized since then to today this trend has reached at no back point. This has become immaterial which party/ a person in power has to comply with these capitalized orders.

 

If this down trend continues for next 22 year that is very apparent. India or Bharat will be totally jobless in 2081 AD

 

In this male dominated society one fact is very hard hitting that male jobs are decreasing at rate of 5.73% per decade where as female jobs are reducing at the rate of 1.66% per decade. This statistics become more crucial after knowing the social fabric of India where males are main bread earners and females play role of bread prepares. If male of society is not able to bring bread for his family the role of female in this social fabric will be further marginalized this will create lawlessness and complete anarchy in the society.

 

In India there are very few families, which are solely dependent on female bread earners. Mostly women work where their husbands are also in jobs. Thus they are helping their husbands in bread earning and preparing.

The precise and timely planning are options left. The hopes are demising. The sun is far away. Only right man at right place can prevent the situation to happen otherwise jobless India is waiting at 2081 AD.

My right: Universal elementary education

A plight on Indian universal elementary education system

 

The god has created this wonderful universe. In this universe he/she has sent human to live. In human he/she has inserted an organ named brain. The brain generates ideas, these come from knowledge and finally knowledge can be gather only and only by education. Thus education is a basic fundamental need of human to live natural life.

In future, India is going to be largest population hub of world. Are we providing our new born brains that knowledge which they deserve? �My Right� deals with this aspect of future’s India. Right to education has become fundamental right in Indian statues books in 2002, as once Indian parliament had given its approval to 86 th constitutional amendment in 2002 under article 21A of constitution. According to this every Indian child 6-14 year of age has fundamental right to free and compulsory education. Additional to this government of India has introduced a bill called �Right to education bill 2005�, which deal with early age child care and education for all children until they acquired the age of six. It also says that, it is the fundamental duty of every Indian parent to provide equal opportunities to his/her children of age of 6-14years to get education.

Please look into this for my sake.

Population (6-14years)

226204139

Source: census 2001&: UNICEF statistical yearbook

 

What are the reasons behind this all?

1. 25% of Indian population still live below poverty line means <one dolor/day . ( appox. 26 cores people ). For them food is theirs first priority, out of total 226204139 population (6-14 year age group) 56573568 are from below poverty line families. To keep them with studies needs extra motivated approach, which missing today in national education system.
2. The low adoption of modern education system by Muslims.

India is a multi religions nation.

1. % of religion based population 2. %of illiteracy among 6-14year

Source: census 2001 Source: census 2001

Above facts clearly tell the whole tale itself. 30.8% of my Muslim friends are remaining illiterate in target age for universal elementary education campaign (6-14 year). This is highest among all religious population in India. It is largely because, Muslims prefer theirs religious education over modern education.

1. Gender biasness.

The Indian society is fully male dominant. The gender equation always tilts towards male section of society, decline sex ratio; numbers of women in different parts of society to government position is clear cut message of bias ness towards women in my part of world. This is also a hurdle in making my school/class fully humane. (Where every child of age 6-14 year can attend it

without any consideration of caste, creed, religion and gender).Please go through it. After making every girl child into school/class room, then and only than we can see education for all in real sense.

primary schoolenrollment rate

Primary completion rates

Youth illiteracy Rate (% of people aged 15-24)

Source: world Bank

1. Urban based education system.

Education system of India is urban centric, Every financial capable Indian parent want to send theirs kids to these urban schooling, so big gap has been created in favors of urban because all good schools, educational institutions and universities are based in urban areas.

Who is caring for me?

The education in India is subject of all and none to responsibility. As per Indian constitution education fall in concurrent list, which mean federal and state governments has its say on this all important subject of human development. Following are my care takers.

1. Federal government.

2. State government.

3. International agencies (united nations)

4. Private sectors.

What are being done for me sake?

1. Sarv shiksha abhiyan( Indian universal elementary education campaign )
2. Mid day meal programme ( food for education launched in 1995 and revised in 2004)
3. District Primary Education Programme ( launched in November, 1994 to overhauling the primary education system in India)
4. Kasturba Gandhi Balika Vidyalaya ( Setting up unto 750 residential schools with boarding facilities at elementary level for girls belonging predominantly to the SC, ST, OBC and minorities in difficult areas . )
5. Programme of Mobilizing Local Support to Primary Schools (PLUS) ( launched in 2004 to get additional local resources by local support.)
6. 86 th constitutional amendment in 2002 under article 21A of constitution. (every Indian child 6-14year of age has fundamental right to free and compulsory education)
7. Right to education bill 2005. (Early age child care and education for all children until they acquired the age of six.)

What I require?

As above stated programmes and schemes are being run by different federal and state governments agencies for me but still I am not able to reach school yet. So to get me enroll in school, I require following.

1. One teacher for 15 students

Students/teacher ratio Source : UNESCO

Above pictorial facts show that developed nations has always less Students/teacher ratio as compare to developing side, but some developing nations has achieved shoulder to shoulder with developed ones like China, Iraq etc. As identical to China, I require one teacher for 19 students of my class.

1. One School in one kilometer radius.

India has 2973190sq.km Land area. AS one school with in one kilo meter radius need approximately 2000000 primary schools, where as only 664041 schools are for me. This clearly means 1335959 more schools I require to get my education near to my home.

1. Free education for all

As per 86 th constitutional amendment has ensured me free and compulsory education (6-14year age). But in practical rural India and some urban, it is too implemented in true sprit.

1. Common education system across India.

As in India education is subject for all but responsibility of none, because there is not a uniform education system in nation. This has made me more vulnerable when I have to move around nation in my 6-14 year’s child hood. So I need a common education system across the nation to make me easy at every part of country as same.

1. Education in my mother tongue

Language is the first barrier which a child has to face in his/her school entrance in India. If it is removed than I may really not fear to attend my school as I do now. Which in latter becomes substantial reason of my drop out from schools.

Where lay my future?

My future is lying in your hands. The world fraternity has pledged in April 2000 at Dakar (Senegal), education for all unto 2015 A.D. Where as my Indian education planners has set 2010A.D for me to be in school/class room. Last not the least is my humble request to all who are concerned with this mission � education for all� that kindly look into above plight, so that my right for universal elementary education will be available to my every brethren and sisters at the time of theirs birth.

Plighted by
An Indian child of 1967

Hello To all

Today is my rebirth in online . I have more than 200 blogs already but this one is means for me because all other are for my mission in life. All writings and photos will be my personal collection and contributions.

so feel free to make my blog as freedom of expression by commenting on my contributions in ‘ Wining Shot”

Dinesh Singh Rawat
(An online Research Journalist