Global Research

The truth is slowly emerging. A Home Ministry report, monitoring deaths by suicide, says that roughly 100,000 farmers committed suicide over six years to 2003 in India. On 18th May 2006, Sharad Pawar, the Minister of Agriculture [MoA], Government of India, presented the data to the Upper House [Rajya Sabha] adding that investigations by state governments on agrarian distress show that the main “cause of suicide is indebtedness.” In the dehumanized statistical gimmickry, the utter devastation of the 100,000 households of dead farmers comprising women, children and elders was quietly buried under the soft thick carpet of the Indian Parliament.

India, with adequate rainfall, warm climate, enormous biological diversity, and excellent traditional agricultural practices, has no reason to face agrarian crisis and, given nature’s bounty, its farmers have no reason to commit suicide. This paper deals with how the rule of one British company and its buccaneers started a process in 1760 that continues to this day, ravaging the farmers of the sub-continent and how independent farmers everywhere are under threat of extinction.

Indian farmers before the “Company Rule”

An average Indian peasant at the beginning of 19th century earned significantly more than his British counterpart and there was no substantial difference between the diets of a peasant and a rich landlord in India. Most significantly, there was a tradition to feed outsiders first, including beggars, before a family sat down to eat. The affluent households did not sell milk and milk products; they were distributed free within the community, a practice that continued right up to 1960s in many parts. The destruction of India’s agriculture and destitution of its farmers is a story of corporate greed and the utter ruthlessness of a small group of people in Europe and the United States who do not value human beings: whites, browns, yellow, or black.

The genesis of agrarian distress

Agrarian distress starts with colonization of India by a British company, the East India Company [EIC] around 1760, their system of extortionate land tax, combined with forcing farmers to grow cash crops [chiefly indigo and cotton] on the best lands and not paying appropriate price for the produce. They systematically destroyed a sustainable agriculture system that’d fed millions for over 6,000 years and then introduced money lenders and rack renters to trap people in debt.

The colonial system of land use led to frequent collapse of India’s farms resulting in food shortage, famine, mass deaths, destruction of fertile lands, and destruction of age-old symbiotic system of farming, animal husbandry, and forestry. While doing nothing to alleviate agrarian distress, the Colonial officials kept repeating, parrot-like, that there are too many Indians! Henry Waterfield’s paper on India’s population density and comparison with some of the regions/countries of Europe is most illuminating: whilst the population density of British Indian Empire was 165 per square mile in 1875, the density of Belgium was 447, England 422, Saxony 377, the Netherlands 291, Italy 237, German Empire 193, Prussia 180, and Switzerland 175. Only France, Denmark, Scotland, Portugal, Spain and Greece had lower population density as compared to India.

[Henry Waterfield , (1875), Memorandum on the Census of British India 1871-72 , London , Eyre and Spottiswoode , p. 6;
http://www.chaf.lib.latrobe.edu.au/dcd/page.php?title=&actionfiltered=next&record=4] 

The British fixed the tax from land at fifty percent of the average gross produce and collected the tax in cash [rupee] that forced the farmers to first sell their produce, earn cash, and then pay tax. This was a unique experience for the Indian peasantry. The costs of maintaining cultural and religious institutions, healthcare facilities, schools, irrigation infrastructure, roads, serais [places where a person could halt at night, somewhat like Inns in England], etc., were extracted in addition to the land tax at least during the first eight decades [1780-1860]. No mercy was shown in matters of tax collection: if harvest was less than normal, the tax could be more than 100% of the value of produce. If price of crops collapsed because of bumper harvest, again the farmer lost to the tax collector.

Economic historians, like Dharampal, have calculated that, for example, in the Madras presidency [present day Tamil Nadu state], from 1830s onward, around one-third of the most fertile land, probably larger in area than the available cultivable land in major counties of England, went out of cultivation by 1840 because, even with 100% produce sold for cash, land tax demand could not be met. The British called it “substantial ‘decay’ of revenue.”

[Dharampal. India Before British Rule and the Basis for India’s Resurgence. 1998. Gandhi Seva Sangh, Sevagram, Wardha, Maharashtra; http://www.swaraj.org/shikshantar/resources_dharampal.html. It should be noted that Sevagram was established by Mahatma Gandhi.]

That substantial revenue decay did not stop their territorial expansion. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1858 that not a penny was spent by British tax payers for the conquest and control of India and the region from St. Helena on the west coast of Africa to Hong Kong in China. The resources, every single penny, were extorted from India’s farmers. India was an awesome cash cow to the company.

For Indian farmer to go hungry, or even remain undernourished, was a new experience, and they retaliated; the history of 1780-1858, is one long list of spontaneous uprisings throughout India.

Indian farmer again begin to feed the millions

The population of India was 238.4 million in 1900. The Colonialists said, “too many, can’t feed ’em all.” It went up to 252.1 million in 1911 and the colonialists said, “too many, can’t feed ‘em all.” In 1947, when India became independent, India’s farmers could feed all of the 325 million. In 1991 there were over 844 million and the farmers fed them all; no famine and no collapse of agriculture as happened time and time again during the British period. Agrarian distress and consequent mass suicide since 1997 once again starts when India exposed its agriculture to foreign companies in 1991 under the IMF sponsored reforms launched by then Finance minsiter Manmohan Singh. It is again driving India’s farmers to hell and this time with full support of the Indian government, officers of the Ministry of Agriculture, and the Agro-scientific establishment. This time there is method in the madness, directed by very illuminated cabal from within and without.

Agrarian distress and the Warehousing Act

In 1945, economists of the Reserve Bank of India, in anticipation of India’s independence, studied farmers’ indebtedness and made four key recommendations:

1. Farmers be provided with facilities for scientific storage of produce in proper warehouses to minimize post-harvest losses;

2. Farmers be issued warehousing receipts against their stocks which could be used to borrow cash from normal banking channel, thereby eliminating dependence on private money-lenders who often charged a minimum of 60% interest;

3. Each warehouse to have a trained technical team who would work closely with agriculture scientists, provide extension services including advice on seeds, fertilizers, and scientific storage of produce; and

4. The warehouse superintendent would advice the farmers when to sell their produce in order to maximize revenue and prevent distress sale.

Whilst the recommendations were excellent, it was only nine years later, after India’s independence, in 1956, that the Warehousing Act was passed by the Parliament. From 1956 to 1971, nearly every state constructed a number of warehouses. The technical people employed in these warehouses were generally competent and highly motivated; they worked with the farmers, helped them, and brought about a degree of stability within rural farming communities.

From 1971 onward the focus of warehousing corporations shifted. The scheme of warehousing receipt was allowed to fall into disuse for various reasons including corruption within warehousing corporations, and pressure from fertilizer and chemical companies to allocate more space for their products. It was a convenient arrangement: the companies got highly subsidized warehousing space and the warehousing corporations got assured income by way of rent with the added comfort of reduced paperwork and virtually no fieldwork with the farmers. Thus, an excellent strategy to pull farmers out of desperation was allowed to fail.

In 1966 the food situation was desperate following three consecutive droughts. The US Government refused to allow sale of wheat to India because of India’s refusal to fall in line with US policies in Asia. 

On the advice of MS Swaminathan, the Government decided to make available fertilizer, pesticides and hybrid seeds to the farmers through these warehouses, at the same nominal rent which was actually meant for the farmers. This is still true in 2006. Thus, the many private and public sector seeds, fertilizer and chemical companies benefited a lot more than India’s peasants from the existing warehousing facilities. Also, the big farmers benefited.

The economics of farming in India: a simple illustration

The following analysis is based on potato and onion crops in one of the largest regions [roughly 700 square kilometres] growing the two crops. The region is south east of Patna and falls within the Gangetic plains. Potato crop is taken in three and half months, onion in about five and half around May. During rainy season the area gets inundated so people have stopped growing paddy. Most of the farmers have forgotten the rejuvenating role of paddy: the algae that grows on stagnant water is nature’s way of fixing nitrogen to the soil, a reason, as Sir Albert Howard, found why farmers of the Gangetic plains had been growing food, season after season, year after year, since hoary antiquity. It should be noted that when the British forced Indian peasants to grow cotton and indigo on lands that were best for paddy, they also destroyed the system of fertility recovery, which caused collapse of winter crops. But let us fast forward to 2004. I found that seeds accounted for 20% of input costs, chemicals (fertilizers and pesticides) about 32%, diesel (to draw water out of the underground aquifers for irrigation) about 10%, and labour 38%. Give or take a few percentage points, this is the break-up of input costs, together for potato and onion crops and is broadly representative of the average costs of farmers in northern India.

With this input, the farmers take about 7 metric tonnes each of potato and onion per bigha (1.59 bigha in this area equals one acre). The five-year average ex-farm price for potato is about Rs 200 per quintal and Rs 250 for onion. Wastage can be pegged anywhere between 10 to 40% on account of drying, rotting, and losses in transit (various government estimates). If the farmer is lucky, and responds to market prices intelligently, he can average about Rs 2000 per tonne for potato and onion. In other words, from two crops he can generate revenue of about Rs. 44,500 per year per acre [about US$ 1,000]. With input costs per acre of about Rs. 38,000, the ex-farm return is about 6,500 plus savings in labour costs that is achieved because the entire household works these farms. This calculation does not include post harvest losses due to rotting, drying, and spoilage during transportation.

The Rs 14,440 computed for labour costs if saved can give the household a net income of Rs 20,900 per acre per year, that is about the same if a family of six were living below the poverty line. Majority is small (below 2 hectare holding) and marginal (below 1 hectare) farmer. So, SMFs can generate a maximum income of about Rs. 50,160 per hectare (Rs 20,900 x 2.4 acre) (or US$ 1,114 per annum per hectare), excluding cost of capital. Rarely do farmers achieve this level of notional mean income.

If a farmer finances 50% of his input costs from borrowings, even at 36% (3% flat rate per month) interest he lands up in serious financial trouble. Many borrow 75-100% of their input costs sometimes at 40% rate of interest. Invariably at harvest time, when there is glut, prices crash. Small and marginal farmers do not have the resources to hire storage space and obtain better price at some future time. Distress sale further erodes a farmer’s financial viability. Those who store their surplus end up losing 10-20% stock due to spoilage and drying shrinkage neutralizing any gains through seasonal price fluctuation.

If the market price drops by 20%, even if the farmer has not borrowed money, he would be in loss to the tune of Rs 2,384 [US$ 53] per acre. Every third year or so, prices crash by as much as 30-50%, largely engineered by traders, leaving farmers deeply in debt. Therefore, the talk of helping farmers with greater access to market, a promise that has been repeated by every politician and every Agriculture Minister since 1947, is unlikely to resolve the problem of assured minimum income. As shown above, SMFs can’t benefit from market access; rather the market left to its own devices works against the interest of SMFs.

It demonstrates how conventional method of farming traps small and marginal farmers into debt, a system of farming that was promoted by Swaminathan, a Rockefeller plant. Swaminathan exploited the desperate food situation in 1966 to the hilt: without critical appraisal of our indigenous system of farming, he vigorously pushed industrial farming methods, trapping farmers into spiraling cost of production financed by debt. This is how small independent farmers in North America were destroyed, to be replaced by industrial farmers. This is how Indian farmers are being destroyed.

Despite the fact that 70% of India’s voters are SMFs living in 600,000 villages, and despite the fact that every politician ritually genuflects to these impoverished pissants at election time, not once the Government of India, or any state government of any political hue, has shown seriousness to pull them out of poverty, poor health, malnutrition, and illiteracy.

The failure of development programmes in India

Since 1951, when India started its Five Year Plans for “planned development” under the influence of Soviet Russia [as much under the influence of the Windsor and the Bilderberg group subsequently], in every Five Year Plan, agriculture and rural development was top priority on paper but the ground reality is quite different.

• Older farmers remember that in 1960s, every agriculture extension officer would go around villages encouraging them to take the “free kit” containing hybrid seeds, fertilizers and pesticides. Initially, output did rise phenomenally. For example the output of wheat went up by 500%, rice by 300%. But in the process many farmers stopped saving their seeds and became heavily dependent on purchased hybrids.

• Irrigation canals were dug up for the farmers, all over the country but many of these never got water; even after three or four decades majority is bone dry. Only few, those dug up in Punjab and Haryana, have water because the engineers diverted perennial Himalayan rivers. The irrigation departments of most states are now infamous more for their corruption and for harassing farmers than for constructing working canals.

• The Rural Electrification programme, started with much fanfare in 1970s, ostensibly for farmers, has failed. In villages after villages one sees electric poles and wires, some have existed for over three decades, but the people are still waiting for electricity. So farmers came to depend upon diesel engine to draw water from underground aquifers. As they drew more water, the water table dropped, requiring more diesel oil to pull water up. Forty years ago one could hit water six feet under ground and construct a perennial well about 12-15 feet deep. Today one would be lucky to get water at less than 120 feet. 

• World’ largest supplementary nutrition programme run by the Indian government since 1974, with financial assistance of UN agencies [Food & Agriculture Organisation, UN-World Food Programme, UNICEF] and the World Bank, supposed to feed women, adolescent girls and children 25 days per month, operates for four or five in majority of distribution centres in the most populous state of India, Uttar Pradesh. The feed is often sold to local traders, which in turn ends up as cattle feed in factory farms or as raw material in food processing industry, or ends up in local grocery stores. Consequently, the SMFs are walking skeletons in most places.

• The Adult literacy programme started in 1950s failed; thirty years later the number of illiterate adults actually doubled in India. In 1988 another “National Literacy Mission” was started but by 1993 it was tottering. Whilst many districts returned fudged figures, the Census 2001 actually reveals that majority of rural people in India is still illiterate. There are villages where not one woman is literate. The resources have been siphoned off but not one officer has been prosecuted. The farming community remains illiterate.

• Majority of farmers do not have access to safe drinking water. The drinking water programme now has provision for restoring traditional rainwater harvesting structures at community level but in majority of villages only water tank, electric pump to draw underground water and expensive pipes are being laid, benefiting manufacturers of these items. Underground aquifers are laced with leached pesticides rendering them unfit for consumption. Because there is no electricity and energy crisis is already reaching explosive proportion, many of these assets will soon become inoperable. Consequently water borne diseases and chemical poisoning are endemic in India and farmers suffer the most.

• Majority of villages do not have sanitation. There are districts where 93% of the rural households do not have a toilet. Under Total Sanitation Programme of the Indian Government, toilets have been constructed with waste water draining out in the streets. Simple solutions like composting toilet system have been ignored. These toilets are actually the world’s biggest sanitation disaster in the making.

• Majority of farmers do not know the services available under Reproductive and Child health [RCH] programme. These services were promised by the Indian Government in the International Conference on Population and Development [ICPD, Cairo, 1994]. Since we share the same one earth, it is imperative that every government behaves in a responsible manner. But the Government of India continues to behave most irresponsibly in matters of quality healthcare and population control.

With few exceptions, the story is the same right across India.

A common strand in nearly all development programmes for rural India is that they directly benefit the corporate sector but NOT the people, nor the local communities. In fact, these programmes not merely cause colossal wastage of tax-payers money; they actually create conditions for slow death by ignorance and filth and diseases.

So, all programmes seeking to alleviate rural poverty, educate the peasantry, and create rural infrastructure are made to fail but no officer and no politician can be held accountable for the failure. The administration operates with rules that ensure that persons in positions of authority can’t be held accountable, ever, for failure. There are indeed excellent officers and effective politicians, but they are invariably marginalized. There is a method at work which few can cope with in this country.

The machinations of the New World Order

Why is it that the elected leaders and the professional civil servants in the world’s largest democracy deliberately keep 70% of its people, the SMFs, in perpetual, servile subjugation? Something very sinister is happening here in India, something as despicable as happened in the Soviet Union about 70 years ago and something that happened in the US over the last 100 years: utter decimation of the independent farmer.

A more complex but logically consistent explanation to the systematic destruction of SMFs in India and independent farmers the world over can be deduced from an excellent expose by Dr John Coleman who has written a book exposing the machinations of the Tavistock Institute [TI]. I am indebted to him for educating me on the insidious role of TI in creating conditions for the successful establishment of the New World Order.

http://www.barefootsworld.net/tavistok.html

Dr John Coleman’s research sheds a new light that forces one to view the present agrarian crisis in a new perspective, possibly never explored before by the Indian intellectuals, whatever that term means, particularly those who claim to represent the civil society; the official intellectuals are anyway deadwoods, co-opted side-kicks of the Rockefellers, et al.

First, the bankers, chiefly the Rockefellers, were responsible for destroying the independent farmer in the US and that story is being repeated in India: destroy the will of SMF in order to control 700+ million Indians forever, condemned to perpetual slavery. This was started by the British colonialists who kept them perpetually hungry for 180 years. In free India the same policy is being continued by the co-opted Indian ruling elite by keeping SMFs illiterate, malnourished, and without any basic services like irrigation, market support, healthcare, sanitation, clean drinking water, schools, healthcare facilities, and roads.

Second, the independent farmer is the greatest threat to the power of the ruling elite the world over because the farmer can produce for himself. He can’t starve. If all independent farmers produced only for personal consumption, the rest of the world can starve, the ruling elite can also starve [unless they eat Martian wheat or Plutonian meat], the square mile of Delhi, where the Indian ruling elite dwells will definitely starve, but not the farmers. If the independent farmer and the SMFs refused to sell their surplus to the food-MNCs, that decision can destroy the US$3.2 trillion food racket and make people so healthy that it would in turn destroy the US$466 billion pharmaceutical industry as well. Oh no, too much money is involved. Hence, the elaborate charade of “farmer-friendly” government, an elaborate mechanism to steal tax-payers money in the name of “poor farmers,” brilliantly engineered by the Leftists and Socialists [chiefly Jawaharlal Nehru and his minions] since 1947. And all this money, running into trillions of rupees since 1947, has neither improved the lot of SMFs, nor helped create sustainable rural infrastructure. The money has simply evaporated and no questions are being asked.

Third, the independent farmers or SMF need capital for labour, inputs and knowledge. Knowledge (to reduce risk) and inputs like fertilizers, pesticides, and seeds are all controlled by big business and, under tutelage of big business, by government officials, including scientists of the Indian Agricultural bureaucracy. The money to buy these critical inputs is supplied by the bankers in the US/EC/Australia and New Zealand AND not supplied by the Indian banking system, now effectively under control of the World Bank and the IMF, which in turn is controlled by the plutocrats like Baring, Hambros, Lazard, Erlanger, Mirabauld, Fould, Mallett, Rothschild+Morgan, Schroeder, and of course the Rockefellers.

Fourth, the SMFs are under pressure in India to produce for Food-MNCs, like PepsiCo and others. The name of PepsiCo comes up time and again when I meet SMFs in northern India. Their field staff has been offering “lucrative” deals for contract farming, a new concept in India. Started by the previous BJP Government, [Hindoo Nationalists, as the British Blabbering Corporation would have us believe, as if Hindooo Nationalists are siblings of the Taliban], the scheme seeks to rent land from SMFs to grow crops that these MNCs need for their food processing business. This will displace millions of SMFs from their farms and further erode the farming skills of these people. Where will they go, how they will spend their time, how much these MNCs will pay them, whether they will pay them at all, and whether they will return the land to the rightful owners are questions that do not occupy the minds of Indian ruling elite. It has the machinations of East India Company written all over. And the same agenda, of the previous Hindooo Nationalist party is being perfected under the present “secular” government, great favourites of Fox, CNN and of course the Leftist BBC, ably supported by the Rightist and Centrist-leftists of India. So, all governments and all political parties are implementing the agenda of the Rockefellers and their ilk, through powerful food-MNCs; we are back in the 1760s, only the names have changed.

Fifth, backward and forward linkages of SMFs’ supply chain are now under control of the big business. Multinational seed companies have set up operations in India, some are frequently in the news for stealing local seeds [Monsanto and Syngenta]. They, along with illustrious names like Swaminathan, are responsible for the destruction of India’s bio-diversity. It should be noted that India had 100,000 rice varieties; today barely 50 are available. Farmers are now dependent upon these multinational seed companies and the first step they have taken is to push hybrid seeds, often stolen from indigenous people and then contaminate local seeds with genetically engineered ones. Local seeds in 39 countries are now contaminated with genetically engineered seeds.

“In his major expose, “The Great Gene Robbery”, Dr. Claude Alvares reveals how the US government stole genes from India through [active connivance of] scientists such as Dr. M S Swaminathan, who was once widely hailed as the father of the Green Revolution” and still influences decisions in India’s Agriculture Ministry. “Alvares describes the marginalization of the brilliant rice specialist, Dr. R H Richharia, who single-handedly fought to preserve a precious… national heritage [the rice seeds] – only to lose to the agents of the US.” [Excerpts from Gene Watch]. This is not India-specific problem; farmers everywhere are fighting a losing battle in matters of seeds.

Similarly fertilizer and pesticides manufacturers now cover the whole of India, with local retail outlets selling potent poisons and the farmers use them without shoes, without facial masks, while women and children are sitting nearby. Recent reports by an NGO reveal that cotton farmers in Punjab state have high levels of pesticide residue in their blood. Incidences of cancer have soared; farmers are dying of pesticide poisoning.

The extortion continues is another form

Each acre under onion and potato gives the MNCs sales worth US$523 in terms of seeds, diesel oil, fertilizers and pesticides, and gives a maximum of US$ 464, under ideal conditions, to the farmer.

Income of farmers [Per annum, per acre]

Farmers   : US$ 144.00  

Savings in labour  : US$ 320.00 [If no bought-in labour cost is incurred]

Gross surplus   : US$ 464.00 [excluding cost of capital]

Income for corporations [per annum, per acre]

Seeds    : US$ 168.89

Diesel    : US$  84.45

Fertilizers and pesticides : US$ 270.23

Total to corporations  : US$ 523.57

If the farmer is taking $464 to an acre, the social cost of $320 additional revenue is enormous: children remain out of school, women work a back-breaking 16-hour day, and the family barely scrapes through two meals a day, sometimes not even that. On the other hand, the environmental cost of $523 going to US and European multi-nationals, their distributors and retailers is also enormous: depleted water resources, poisoned land, dead soil, destroyed bio-diversity, contamination of natural seeds with genetically engineered ones, destruction of the habitat, contamination of natural water bodies, emergence of unknown diseases and widespread health problem including cancer, diabetes, immune disorders, etc. 

Shape of things to come: the silent killers

The global food industry is worth 3.2 trillion US dollars and growing, possibly worth US$ 4 trillion. The food industry can maximize its profits only if it controls the farm workers and their land; that is the logic of food business.

Table 1 GLOBAL MARKETS

  
US$ million
% of total

Seeds
21,000
0.55%

Fertilizer
80,000
2.10%

Pesticide
35,400
0.93%

Food industry
3,200,000
84.16%

Pharmaceutical
466,000
12.26%

Total
3,802,400
100.00%

The table shows that people purchased food worth US 3.2 trillion dollar on earth. In order to generate 3.2 trillion dollar worth of sales for the food industry, the farmers paid 21 billion dollars to the seeds industry, 80 billion dollars to the fertilizer industry, and 35.4 billion dollars to the pesticide industry. And each industry is a silent killer. When people got sick and debilitated, they paid an additional US$ 466 billion to the pharmaceutical industry to cope with the after effect of that food, remain sane and survive. The plutocrats who control the banks control seeds, fertilizers, and food industries and also control the pharmaceutical industry.

The truth

A poor farmer of India today earns US$ 144 from his back-breaking effort: exactly 12 dollars per month. If the entire household works an acre, including children as young as five, they just might earn US$ 464 from their meager holding of an acre, provided all factors are favourable, which rarely happens. But the corporations, their distributors and retailers extract US$ 523.57 from each acre worked whether the farmer earns even a dollar or not. This is what Dr John Coleman is talking of when he says the Rockefellers have engineered the destruction of the independent farmers in the US and the same story is being repeated here in India.

The suicides of Indian farmers serve two purposes: one, it is reducing the population of India and reducing the pressure on natural resources for reasons that have been engineered by neo-conservative thinkers controlling Washington’s policy. World population must be reduced to 1750 level of 770 million if the planet is to survive in post oil era. This was known to a small group in the US back in 1974 and the plan for culling world population was set in motion by Henry Kissinger, endorsed by Jimmy Carter, furthered by Reagan, George Bush senior, Clinton, and now being expedited by baby George. And two, while the plutocrats implement their agenda through the co-opted Indian ruling elite, they’d extract as much profit as they can, while simultaneously killing as many on earth. Profit must be ensured, no matter how many die. And the Indian governments have been active co-conspirators in this agenda since 1947. Earlier it was Nehru and his daughter Indira Gandhi who ruled India for 34 years. Then Rajiv Gandhi, Indira Gandhi’s son, who ruled this hapless nation. Today, Manmohan Singh, Montek Singh, Chidambaram, Karat, Sitaram, and the entire Indian political and bureaucratic establishment is responsible for creating conditions for culling India’s population.

The tragedy of it all is that every person on this earth is under death sentence from depleted uranium contamination of the earth’s atmosphere: every person of every class, colour, creed, or religion. The ruling elite of Delhi are particularly vulnerable. They have been breathing depleted uranium contaminated air since 1991 and they are all under death sentence. How long they will lead a normal life before dying a painful, prolonged death is their problem, not mine. But they are as much responsible for the death of farmers as they would be for their own death and the death of an ancient civilization because they failed to read the writing on the wall.

World’s two greatest democracies are writing the epitaph of the independent farmers and their own people. The irony of it all is that gravestones for American farmers are actually produced in the stone quarries of India by surplus farm hands; the wood for funeral pyres of India’s dead farmers are sourced by bribing forest officials here, directly or indirectly. The Illuminati rules, okay!

Arun Shrivastava MBA, CMC, is a certified management consultant. He can be contacted at: [email protected]