Harvest of kidneys

Harvest of kidneys

Bizarre. The stories from Chandrababu Naidu's cyber-friendly Andhra Pradesh have a decided Kafkaesque ring to them. A fortnight ago, babies being sold in the Lambada hamlets of Nalgonda caused consternation all around. Now, according to the latest reports, impoverished farmers of Rentachintala, a village in Guntur district, faced with their failing cotton and chilli crops, are resorting to reaping a harvest from their own bodies. No less than 26 farmers are believed to have sold their kidneys to some enterprising merchant in body parts, based in New Delhi. It was their desperation to get out of the debt trap that had motivated them to do this, and how widespread that desperation was can be gauged from the fact that more than a 100 men in that village wanted to sell their kidneys and had turned up for the pre-operative fitness tests.

The farmers even justified this extreme action by pointing out that selling a kidney is far better than committing suicide or resorting to the ugly begging-and-borrowing routine to make ends meet. Such rationalisation arises, not from reasoned argument, but deep despair. Once money from the sale of this kidney runs out, what happens next? Which part of the anatomy will then be required to be placed on the chopping block to stave off the wolf at the door? That this is in contravention of the provisions of the law is only half the story. Rentachintala's radical solution is actually no solution. It also symbolises the failure of the interventionist policies of the government. It is time then for the TDP government to come up with a targeted plan to help isolated farming communities, who have had to face the vagaries of the weather and the failure of crops, cope with their distress.

This would need a multi-pronged approach, starting with a thorough mapping of the drought-affected region and an assessment of the viability of the cropping patterns in the region, given the prevailing adverse climatic conditions.

The lucrative returns on cash crops like cotton have often encouraged farmers to rush into cultivating them blindly. Major shifts in the cropping preferences of farmers have been noticed, not just in Andhra Pradesh, but all over the country. For instance, the cultivated area under sugar cane in India increased from 4,64,000 hectares in 1994-95 to 4,373,000 in 1995-96. Similarly, land under cotton increased from 7,079,000 hectares to 9,031,000 hectares in the same period. This has its own ecological consequences. It entails an ever greater dependence on irrigation and pesticides. The biggest lesson from Andhra Pradesh is that computer data, per se, cannot solve human problems or replace sound administrative policies. But what it can do is to encourage the process of drawing the right lessons from the evidence that data provides. Hopefully, Andhra Pradesh's chief minister will rise to the challenge before more people in Rentachintala, or any other village for that matter, are driven to relinquishing assortedbody parts.