Sir,
India is primarily an agrarian country and majority of the people living in our country depend on agriculture for their livelihood.A large no of the farmers among them are small and marginal farmers who own small pieces of land and do intensive farming to sustain themselves and the members of their family.Some others work on the land of others as labourers to earn their bread and butter.Thus,a vast chunk of our poulation is dependent on agriculture directly or indirectly. But being dependent on the natural rain for their crops, they are vulnerable to unpredictability of nature and often suffer heavy losses in times of heavy rains or prolonged spells of drought.
The recent unseasonal torrential rains across the most parts of our country, especially in the northern and the central India including the States of Jammu and Kashmir, Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Rajasthan etc. caused widespread havoc by destroying infrastructure by way of causing massive destruction to roads, buildings and thus making the life of the people hard and miserable. But the worst sufferers are the farmers whose standing crops of wheat, mustard, potato etc have suffered massive devastation and their only source of sustenance and livelihood perished almost completely almost in some cases.Not only this, unseasonal rains have delayed the process of sowing the seeds of new crops because of excessive wetness of land.There are also reports of many farmers in some states having taken the extreme step of committing suicide after suffering heavy losses because of the devastation of their crops and not being able to cope up with the shock and unable to pay the debt.
It is, thus ,the first and foremost responsibility of a responsive Government to help the farmers in distress by safeguarding their interests and investments. The Government ought to introduce the scheme of crop insurance so that in case of natural calamities interests can be protected.They need to be provided the support in the form of subsidy on the premium to be paid for insuring their crops.The farmers must also be provided free seeds,pesticides and fertilizers on subsidized rates in such times in order to enable them to start their farming activities for the new crops.
Yours etc…..
Ashok Sharma
Udhampur
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