My Farmily and Other Animals

I reach the farm around 9 this morning, the morning after a night of gentle, persistent rain.  The air is heavy with moisture and the tall grass greets me with a fragrance, while its bushy heads brush against my skin.  I pick my way carefully on the soft, wet earth, for the-morning-after is time for the Kingdom of Animalia.  This is mid-day already for the birds – white-headed babblers (damn their new name), bushchats, bulbuls, tailor birds, sunbirds, white-eyes, mynas and the odd bushlark me thinks, though I am missing the chatter of the white-browed bulbul family that’s usually around the young mango.  As I open the house door and deposit the bag, a wasp from the in-house nest greets me with a buzz, a menacing keep-away whirr.  Two of her female ancestors had given me a nasty sting some years ago, so I get this message well (males are the benign, retiring type who’d rather curl up with a book than pick a fight, and that’s why we’ll get along well if we e’er meet).  Over the years, I have removed the wasp nest often (after saying my prayers), but they always return and the last time Anand, my extraordinary brains trust, was asked his opinion, he lit a quick small fire and finished them off, which destroyed not just the wasps but my heart as well.  So, I have decided to let live (and not provoke the females, after all this #MeToo stuff).   

Anand and I walk to the back of the farm, a patch of horse gram (huruli) that is as nutritious as it is unfussy to grow.  The lush sight is a delight to see, the little saplings waving excitedly in the breeze.  He shows me the impressions of the hoof of wild boar as it traversed through the patch to the ragi across, being grown, thankfully, by my neighbour (who is not averse to occasional flavouring of rice-and-curry with some bacon).  Even as we stand there, a small flock of baya weaver birds descend on the guava tree by the small pond and their excitement suggests that it’s nesting time – indeed, monsoons is when they work their magic.  The path is dotted with gorgeous lemon-yellow butterflies – the Common Grass Yellow – flitting about with purpose, in which pursuit, of course, they differ vastly from me. 

Did I just hear a Crested Serpeant Eagle?  It isn’t to be seen, which is odd, but the call – that deceivingly plaintive cry – is, as an Ornithologist would say in his tongue, diagnostic. “Do not enter the Tuvare (toor dal) patch, Sir,” Anand says, “there is a bee hive there.”  Which, of course, is great news for pollination.  I would not have entered the Tuvare anyways, for it has grown taller than I am and is densely packed – a walk through this would have had the heart doing a lively gig.   

We begin the walk to the front of the farm – the Western side, so to speak -  and, a few steps ahead, a grey francolin (a big name for a partridge) takes off just ahead, giving me quite a start and Anand a hearty laugh.  A month ago, I had seen their dainty little nest with eggs under a clump of grass.  They are generally heard more than seen, yet they are lovely birds, tubby and compact, in the line of evolutionary thought that includes quails and pheasants.  Thankfully, in our area, they aren’t caught for the table (well, at least to my knowledge). 

We are now past the little patch of greens that I am looking forward to eating next month (if not beaten to it), and Anand stops all of a sudden and points to a solitary scat on the path.  “Jungle cat,” he says with assuredness, and I feel a thrill, for this is a first.  “It seems to have gone this way last night.”  As we walk further, he points, with disappointment, to the now-sparse patch of jowar by the water-channel.  “The monkeys came a couple of days ago and destroyed this,” he says in irritation, and I share the emotion, not being particularly fond of bonnet macaques.   

Even as we stand there, staring at the soil, he bends down and examines a paw print in the soft earth.  Hares, two of them, went by last night too, their prints and droppings pointing the way.  At one point they seemed to have both stopped to deposit an entire load of droppings and I can, in my mind’s eye, see them now:  the male standing up and sniffing nervously, looking around all the time, with his black-tipped ears twitching like vibrant antennae.  I love to see hares bound across a field in a sprint that can leave you breathless and awed.  They are, in a phrase, Nature’s great dashers.  When in my teens, I read an eerie story called “The Rabbit’s Paw” (read it at your peril), but it only enhanced my fondness for rabbits (and, by extension, their Indian cousins).   

At my foot is a tiny LadyBird beetle.  Can Nature be more resplendent than this?  “We call it Guruganji vola (insect),” Anand says in reponse to my question and, on reflection, this is a brilliant name.  Guruganji is the local name for Abrus Precatorius (or the Crab’s Eye), which is Kunnikuru in Malayalam.  The LadyBird looks just like the Crab’s Eye, so what could be better than naming an insect after a seed that it resembles?  Damn the science, admire the simplicity.   

After Anand leaves for lunch, I stroll on my own – there’s a treepie up there, and his cousins, the crows, come around when I have lunch.  They know that I will give them a piece or two, not just of food, but of my mind as well.  My Great-Grandmother, a woman of incredible fortitude with a toothless grin and a yawning earlobe, used to keep one ball of rice for the crows on the low roof at the back, for these were, she insisted, her ancestors reborn, who would keep an eye out for her.  I share no such sentiment (or perhaps I do).  She, my Great-Grandma, lived to the age of 98, so the crows have a trick we don't quite know about.

I am in the porch and, taking a step forward, I see a movement on the stone patch a few feet to my left.  A striped keelback – a beautiful, harmless snake – is moving rapidly away from me, for the last thing it wants is to be near humans.  The moment it enters the grass I know that I have lost it for good. 

I must be honest, I miss Colonel Haathi.  It’s been a while since he visited, but I know that when the ragi is ready to be taken, you can’t keep a good elephant away. 

A Rhetorical Question To a Common Sense Economist

Allow me to ask you a question, well, a rhetorical one, after I present some essential macroeconomic data, basic stuff at that: 

Your Government has a historical record of budget deficits, more recently at around 4% of the Gross Domestic Product, but at earlier highs of 6-6.5% of GDP.  In the current Financial Year (2018-19), the Government will borrow around Rs 6 lakh crores to fund a deficit of 3.3-3.5% of the GDP.   

Now, here’s the question: what is your opinion of the following plan that your Government might present?

The Government says – let’s suppose – that it wishes to run a long-term project over the next twenty years which has the following characteristics:

- It will cost a minimum of about Rs 1 lakh crores a year (that’s Rs 1,00,000,00,00,000).  Once begun, this investment cannot be stopped without delaying the project and increasing its cost.  This alone will, at current price levels, increase the budget deficit by about 0.5% of GDP every year and contribute to inflation.

- The overall cost therefore would be about Rs 20 lakh crores.

- All of this money will be raised by borrowing, within India and abroad.

- The project has never been done earlier in any part of the World, never tried out at anything close to the scale that the Government is proposing.

- The benefits from this project are entirely in the realm of speculation and subject to a number of assumptions – including one on weather patterns.  None of these assumptions have been put up for scientific review and educated scrutiny.

- There is no peer-reviewed independent project report by a ‘non-interested’ stakeholder that has detailed the net benefits of the project after a cost-benefit study.  

- The employment benefits from the project are, relatively speaking (ie, in comparison to alternatives that could be done with that kind of money), marginal to the point of being irrelevant.  The agricultural unemployment resulting from the displacement as a result of the project is likely to be – there are no reliable estimates here – greater than the employment generated, resulting in significantly higher migration to the cities by both landless and landed (but now ‘de-landed’ agriculture workers)

- It is likely – indeed, probable – that some parts of this giant project will be stalled due to land acquisition issues, local stakeholder protest and intervention by the Judiciary (though such intervention may be years in the future, making the project even riskier)

- Which brings us to the issue of risk management; the project has no public risk management profile or document, nothing that alerts us to possible show-stoppers, unintended consequences or accidents.

This utterly insane white elephant is the loosely termed ‘river-linking project’, which was budgeted in the year 2002 to cost about Rs 5.2 lakh crores.  The project targets thirty rivers in India and seeks to inter-connect them in the hope that floods will be prevented by such connection as waters seek their own level.  

It is an idea that is as foolish as it is quixotic, as unequivocally disastrous as it is costly and as useless as it is destructive.  Everything about this project has ideology sans reality written all over it and yet, over the last two decades, the project has received undue impetus.  

Beyond all of the above – each of which should by itself be enough to halt the progress of the project – is the issue of planetary geoengineering that is being attempted, possibly beyond the scale of the Three Gorges Dam.  Could such effort have unintended – and unpleasant – consequences?   

Indeed, yes.  Take dams, for instance.  Over the last sixty years, the construction of dams in India alone has displaced four million people, arguably the biggest cause for refugees – ecological refugees – after partition.  Despite all attempts at water distribution from these dams, desertification and land degradation is growing as never before, with such geoengineering resulting in other unintended consequences including the decimation of fish habitat and concomitant loss of fishing livelihoods.  

A second example.  In an excellent article titled ‘The Risk of Planetary Geoengineering’, Rahul Matthan writes of a crazy attempt in the 1950s to seed clouds in the US and control the weather called Project Cirrus.  Read this:

“ In their first attempt, they took on a hurricane heading to Jacksonville.  A Project Cirrus plane dropped dry ice along the edge of the squall line and almost instantly, the clouds shed rain over the sea.  This was the result they were anticipating and they hoped that this would cause the storm to change its direction.  

While the storm initially turned away as they hoped, it soon made a dog-leg turn over the Atlantic and headed back to the mainland with renewed vigour.  The resulting Frankenstein’s monster of a storm was more vicious than before, its winds gusting at a hundred miles an hour by the time it made landfall over the Savannah.  It smashed windows, flattened sugarcane fields and caused upwards of $23 million of damage.” 

The consequence of river linking are too frightening to contemplate – and these are the intended ones.  The ecological cost of the project includes the destruction of swathes of forest and vastly increased human activity in protected areas, while the benefit of flood mitigation is, at best, a hope – just how can one predict if this will work? 

The Government of India should be doing quite the opposite of what it proposes – it makes excellent economic sense to protect the river courses as they are, remove encroachments, spend a fraction of the funds that would go into linking rivers to clean them up instead and protect the riparian forests that then mitigate flood impact.  Watershed management and river conservation must be given the most important place in Government policy, for our human capital’s productivity depends on it, more than on anything else.  Is common sense too much to expect?