The farmers in Rukum can learn a lesson from Gulmi, where paincho has been successful
While presenting the fiscal budget for the year 2022/23 on May 29, Finance Minister Janardan Sharma allocated Rs 55.97 billion along with Rs 1 billion as seed funding for the Farmers' Pension Scheme. He had also announced that the imports of paddy, maize wheat, main cereals, and vegetables would be reduced by 30 per cent. Similarly, barren, unused land would be made available to the farmers and cooperatives on lease for cultivation, agricultural technicians would be placed in all the wards, minimum support price would be fixed, and agricultural produce would be bought by the government. He had also promised that the farmers would be provided with seeds, fertilisers and technology, concessional loan and agricultural insurance schemes would be expanded to develop the agriculture sector. These are the fundamental announcements made by the government in the agriculture sector, which has always received low priority, and whatever programmes are announced are also not implemented. It has already been one-and-a-half months since the budget was passed by the federal parliament, but none of the budget has reached the concerned government agencies and local levels, which are supposed to implement these programmes at the grassroots levels.
There is no doubt that the agriculture sector would get a boost should all the government programmes move ahead in a planned way.
However, the ground reality is that none of the schemes announced by the government through the fiscal budget are implemented as the grassroots levels and the farmers are left to fend for themselves. For agriculture to foster, the goods produced in the rural areas must have access to markets, which unfortunately are dependent on the middlemen, who buy them at throwaway prices that do not even cover the cost of investment. Agricultural growth is impossible unless the government breaks the middlemen ship.
A report from Rukum-east states that the local farmers have grown potatoes, but they lack storage facility due to which they are compelled to sell their produce at a cheaper rate compared to the market prices. Cold storage facility is a must to store potatoes for a longer period of time. The farmers can sell their produce at a higher price if they have such a facility near their locality. The farmers in Rukum district have started producing potatoes on a large scale in recent years. But they cannot store them for a longer period due to lack of cold-storage facility. Thus the government should help build cold storage facility in every rural municipality so that the farmers can store potatoes and other perishable vegetables and fruits until they get a better price in the market. The farmers in Rukum and the adjacent districts could, however, learn a lesson from Gulmi district, where an organisation called paincho programme has been highly successful. The paincho programme collects all the vegetables, fruits, milk and pickles from all the villages and sells them in Butwal and Bhairahawa.
The farmers are paid weekly based on the market price. This type of scheme could be replicated in other parts of the country as most of the villages have access to rural roads. The paicho programme has also successfully displaced the middlemen who used to exploit the farmers.
Utter negligence
That 32 students of a school fell ill after consuming the free lunch served in the canteen in Jhapa last week shows the height of negligence while preparing food. According to doctors, the students fell ill due to food poisoning. The canteen owner has been arrested for serving leftover food, which had gone bad due to the sweltering heat. Not only the food, the drinking water is also said to have been contaminated with worms found in it. Hence, it is no surprise that so many students fell ill in one go.
It needs no repeating that sanitation and cleanliness are not generally observed while cooking and serving food, whether in an eatery or out in open in the streets. And it is less likely to be so in a canteen of a school. Thus, it is the responsibility of the school management to see that the bare minimum standards of cleanliness are maintained. Daily inspection of the kitchen and the food brought in would greatly improve the quality of the food served there. There is no point in providing midday meals to improve school attendance if students are falling sick due to consumption of contaminated food and water. There will be no improvement in the situation as long as the offenders are let off the hook easily.
A version of this article appears in the print on August 29, 2022 of The Himalayan Times.
