SENSE AND SENSIBILITY

To protest the central government's decision to import milk powder and other dairy products, some activists spilled thousands of liters of milk on the Satara-Pune highway.
The activists stopped a milk tanker on the highway and spilled the milk all over the road. The import of dairy products will hurt the interests of the local dairy farmers, they claimed. 
In a similar protest a week ago, other activists had stopped five tankers and wasted over 50,000 liters of milk in Satara claiming that the organization had decided to take the step as milk prices would reduce by Rs 5 per liter following the Centre's decision to import 30,000 tonnes of milk powder.

                        This is the scenario in India where 47% of the children exhibit a degree of malnutrition. 2.1 million Indian children die before reaching the age of 5 every year – four every minute – mostly from preventable illnesses like malnutrition, diarrhea, fever etc. If a protest had to be staged it could have been done in a more sensible manner. The protest could have been carried out by hijacking milk tankers and redistributing milk free of cost among poor people in that area. Surprisingly in a country whit revolution had to be launched in order to raise milk production to meet the demands of the growing population, there itself a whooping 50,000 litres of milk was drained out on the streets! Shocking but true! Its all the matter of sense and sensibility.

                        Was there really no way to sort out the differences with the government peacefully? I guess probably we Indians, belonging to a country of Gandhi have taken the Gandhian ideal of  Satyagraha far too seriously yet misinterpreted the process way too much. The activists projected the aim of their protest as guarding the interests of local dairy farmers who would be financially crippled due to import of milk powder but in the way they forgot that those 50,000 liters of milk must also have been the output of some other farmers’ hardwork which they ruthlessly wasted which could have filled the empty growling stomachs of many rather than washing the streets!

                            This is not a single instance of (non)sense. Rich farmers in Delhi and western U.P. poured milk in a drain in New Delhi on 21^st April 2012 in a protest against the decision of milk products producing companies to reduce the purchase price of milk by 37%. No words!

                                    The wastage story doesn’t end here. There’s more to it. In India about % of the population that is about million people sleep empty stomach every day. At the same time the other side of the coin is this- As on August 1, 2010, the total food stocks with the FCI were 55 million tonnes (mt) as compared to the buffer requirements of 27 mt. Of this, 15 mt of wheat was lying in the open in Punjab and Haryana alone. As per estimates, 50,000 tonnes of food stocks have already deteriorated beyond human consumption as a result of long, improper storage. Reason? Black marketing, illegal stocking and hoarding of grains and then reselling the hoarded grains, obtained at a low price from the government under the PDS, in the open market when the price increases due to low availability of grains. No doubt the government has implemented many schemes for the welfare of the poor but there is no proper implementation at any level. From the grass root level of villages to big cities the poor barely obtain any advantage out of it and die of malnutrition and hunger. have farmers toiled so hard to feed their grains to rodents and rats? Apart from loss of grains how can we neglect the loss of resources gone into producing that amount of grain? The people in the BPL have been there for years and years and still there seems to be no scope of their upliftment. On both sides we Indians are at loss. People in Orissa  and other poor states die of hunger and at the same time rich farmers in Punjab and Haryana face losses due to over production.

Hence at this point, with no dearth of facilities, the only thing India needs is implementation of policies and schemes because we can surely not ignore the current situation.