Farmer ‘turns bullock’ for survival Aseem N wrote this at 2:29 pm • Filed under India •

While you were enjoying and celebrating this festive season… the ganesh chaturthi… expressing jubilation over the high decibel sound of bursting of fire crackers and bomb explosions… in some remote village, there was some poor farmer forced to act as a bullock to plough his fields. And even after your festive celebrations are over and you are back to your routine life (still enjoying with kitty parties, office parties, partying at CCD… or basically trying to find any and every dumb reason to party) the difference is that, this farmer as many others, still continues to plough…!!!

And may be one day, one of them might even commit a suicide and you will prefer to turn over the newspaper page that describes this plight of the farmers… Just because you don’t want to spoil your mood early in the morning. But the truth is that, for any other time, you would do nothing different… giving yourself some other stupid reason to escape the news item.

Yes, it does happen… the city man of India conveniently skips from seeing the dark and gloomy face of India… the India that’s still struggling to only make a living. And for those who do care, may be just like you and me… won’t take any step forward than to write a small blog post, and forget about it the very next day. Probably only blaming the Indian government, cursing corruption, nature and all those myriad reasons that one could find to elude his/her responsibility. And if we all do manage to run off scot free, we hate to accept that we are fooling none other than our own selves.

For the last couple of days if you were not watching only a MTV, SONY or a STAR and managed to switch your TV to any news channel… CNN-IBN has been repeatedly airing this story… Farmer ‘turns bullock’ for survival.

CNN-IBN covers -

It’s festival season in Maharashtra, but celebrations are not for all, especially farmers in Vidarbha.

Heavy downpour and flooding after years of continuous drought in the region have played havoc in the life of poverty-ridden farmers, and one of them even has to act as a bullock to plough his fields for survival.

Shankar Dabe Rao, a cotton farmer in Maharshtra’s Buldhana District has been forced to fill-in for one of his bullocks, which was washed away in the recent floods.

The waters took with it not just the bull, which was bought with borrowed money, but also Shankar’s crops, his only means of re-paying the loan.

And to break this cycle of ever increasing debt, Shankar says, he had no choice but to take the place of his bull and ask his 72-year-old father to help him plough the field.

“I am waiting for the government’s rehabilitation package. My financial situation is so bad that I have even thought of committing suicide,” said Shankar Dabe Rao, the cotton farmer.

The news reveals that over 150 farmers have committed suicide in this region in the month after the Prime Minister’s visit… yet there are no major signs of relief… That even after realisation could prove to be just too little and too late!

A few months back, I was watching a similar coverage… NDTV showing teens partying at CCD, and all of them unresponsive and indurate towards the situation of the farmers… just about a 40kms away from the place they were partying at. I sometimes wonder, whether our youth is really so dumb that they are unaware of the dingy fabric of the poor India? Or are they just too smart to overlook it all for their own merry reasons!

We still remain unaware of the ground realities, the deplorable facts of the bare India… still enjoying our party mood… skipping and escaping articles like these… wearing the same cotton clothes these farmers have contributed to, yet dismissing them even of a miniscule consideration in our daily lives… how much more callous and insensitive can we get??!!!

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