Big business and machines have robbed the value paddy

Big business and machines have robbed the value paddy

Grandfather Durai and Grandfather Rasu often used to say when they were alive, that if you put eight bags of paddy, you can buy one sovereign of gold. Such was the situation when agriculture was profitable. It was a time when you could survive if you had a piece of field. The price of gold and the price of the bag of paddy did not come to that equilibrium until the time of their death. After their death, the price of a bag of paddy continued to fall. The price of gold soared. Agriculture has gradually fallen.

Now fifty bags of paddy are equal to one sovereign of gold and you need some additional money for the wastages and wages of gold.

By 1981, when my father joined teaching profession, his salary was Rs. 600 and a sovereign gold cost is less than Rs. 150. He paid Rs. 60 for house rent. If there was no lapse of memory in what he said then that was the situation. If my father manage family expenses within Rs. 300 he would have bought two sovereign of gold every month in the remainin money.

If my father were to get the salary today in the proportion he bought then, he would have to get two lakhs a month. There are so many jobs here that the annual income is less than two lakhs.

Paddy had a good value then. My father would also say that many people in the villages used to buy paddy and boil it and sell it as rice. Can't do that now? That is not possible today.

How did the price of a bag of paddy go down when everything went up in the course of years? Rice yield has increased in economic terms of yield and demand. Rather than the reduced demand, rice has started to be available in abundance without shortage. Even if there is a shortage now, the price of paddy may also increase like the price of tomatoes and onions, which go up suddenly in a few months of the year.

Houses with large paddocks no longer exist. Paddocks have shrunk. I think it has something to do with the price of a bag of paddy.

The sprawling paddies were filled with bundles of paddy during the harvest season and people at other times in the paddocks. I have thought that the fall in the price of the paddy bag has shrunk the paddocks. If the price of paddy bags increases, farmers may consider stocking paddy at home. Then they will definitely need paddocks in their homes.

It was the value of paddy that was behind the storage of paddy. Even in my time, there were children who picked up the paddy falling in the field and earned money from the collected paddy. Now I see more and more children who are afraid to walk in the fields and go into the fields. Now there is no need to earn money by collecting paddy.

Even the time when paddy was claimed as farm wages was a few decades ago. Paddy is also in barter. The women who put paddy and buy salt and the boys who give paddy and buy ice cream have now disappeared. If you pay money, you can buy Tata's salt, which is called the salt of the nation, at the petty shop. The value of paddy has disappeared without being able to compensate for the value of money.

Many years have passed since the farmers started thinking like traders that storing paddy and grinding it to make rice are expensive jobs.

It is profitable to buy paddy in large quantities and turn it into parboiled rice. If it is done as a small-scale handicraft or small business, that profit turns lose. It is cheaper to buy paddy as rice than to make it into rice. Not only is paddy made into rice, it is also very easy to buy it as flour for grinding idli-dosa dough.

There is a huge difference between paddy prices and rice prices. You cannot buy a kilo of cucumber or a kilo of tomatoes within twenty rupees. But you can buy a kilo of paddy. A kilo of paddy can be bought for twenty rupees and a kilo of rice can be sold for more than forty rupees. Although a kilogram of paddy does not yield exactly one kilogram of rice, the bran and husk fetch a good price.

The price difference between paddy and rice could not be made as a small business to make a profit by buying it in bulk and turning it into profit. As a result, farmers who grow paddy do not do the work of turning it into rice. They complete their duty by leaving the produce in the hands of the traders.

Paddy heated to make parboiled rice in a wood-fired oven, dried in a paduda, and prepared as hand punch is so delicious. It takes a lot of work and effort. You can buy rice in the market for fifty percent less than the price of homemade parboiled rice. Fifty percent of human labor can be reduced in procurement and manufacturing of machines. In this way, agriculture, which had many different possibilities to involve a large number of people, has now been reduced to a level where less people and machinery are sufficient. We have sacrificed agriculture, which is full of industrial and small business opportunities, to the theory of big business and mechanization. Conditions have come where you can do the current agriculture with only machinery. I think it is the mass procurement and machines that are grabbing the right price for a bag of paddy.

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