Two different worlds

Farmers here grow two crops every year. The second  set of crops will be sown now .With the rain gods being benevolent this year with heavy rainfall over the last few weeks, everyone in Mullaikulathur is gearing up for the busiest part of the agriculture cycle.

 The fields are being readied to sow the crops. Large fields are usually segregated into smaller areas where the sowing is done, segment by segment. The crop to be sown is first grown in a separate plot. On the day of sowing, the two week-old crops are uprooted in bunches and carried to the fields to be sown.

The field is readied by ploughing and water logging. Bigger farms use tractors and the smaller farms use motor-driven ploughs which need to be guided by hand. The old world oxen-driven ploughs is no longer used and finds a place only in Indian movies.

The well to do farmers and the other smaller farmers seem to exist in different worlds altogether. While the richer agriculturist use more sophisticated tools to minimize labour and maximize productions, the others still depend on manual labour to do the bulk of the farm work. The sowing season makes this contrast very evident. Thandavamurthy has a sowing machine which he uses to plant the rice saplings. The machine can be operated by even a child and it helps him drastically reduce on labour.

He procured the sowing machine because of the government subsidy reducing its cost to Rs.75000.The rice saplings are fed to the machine which then plants the saplings with exact spacing with almost no labour cost.

In the adjacent farm one can see the traditional way of sowing the paddy. The men prepare the field and stack up bunches of rice saplings.It is the women who sow the saplings. A small field employs around  10-15 women to plant the saplings.This is also the only means of income for most of these women.

One wonders whether there is any merit in using farm equipment meant for countries like America and Australia - where there is a serious dearth of labour – in India. On one hand we are trying to reduce unemployment through various government schemes and on the other we encourage use of farm equipment to reduce labour. It is in the midst of such ironies that we in India live.