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- Created on 31 August 2014
Baroda Heavy Water plant: Image Courtesy HWB
The Department of Atomic Energy (DEA) has embarked on a slew of projects to reduce the country’s dependence on import of strategic materials required by the nuclear power and defence industries.
The projects include a nuclear-grade sodium metal plant (SMP); a Magnesium Recyclying Technology Development & Demonstration Faciltiy (MRTDDF); a commercial-scale uranium extraction plant (UEP) for segregating this nuclear fuel from fertilizer-grade phosphoric acid and a Technology Demonstration Plant (TDP) for production of 4N pure Titanium Dioxide & 4N pure Zirconium oxy-chloride. 4N or 4 nines is an indicator of purity of a metal. It means a metal is 99.99% pure.
These and other such strategic projects might serve as a setback to certain foreign-funded entities that have been working againt India’s energy and territorial security under the garb of opposition to nuclear energy and environmental degradation.
The country currently meets its entire requirement for sodium and magnesium metals from abroad. Import liberalization, high power tariff and certain other factors forced four sodium and magnesium plants to stop production several years back.
The Prime Minister Narendra Modi should commission a case study on the closure of factories by dominant or monopoly producers in all sectors before reiterating his call all investors to set up manufacturing facilities in the country.
As sodium is used as a coolant in fast breeder reactors, DAE’s Heavy Water Board (HWB) has decided to set up a 600 tonnes per annum (tpa) plant at Baroda.
Says HWB’s pre-feasibility report (PFR) on the plant, “this project is of national importance for generation of clean energy without producing any greenhouse gases.”
Read more: Atomic Energy Entities Embark on Strategic Import-Substitution Projects
- Created on 17 January 2021
Statutory Minimum support price (MSP) is not a weird demand of farmers. It is actually a multi-dimensional fuzzy ball debated superficially by half-knowledge anchors and their guests on cockfight shows.
No one has disclosed how many committees recommended what and when on statutory MSP over more than 100 years. A timeline of vital recommendations made by major panels has been prepared later in this column to give a touch of White Paper (WP) for giving a new deal to agriculture.
If farmers-caring Government had cared for facts, it would have first published a WP on why it showed urgency to issue three farm ordinances. It should have rationalized NDA’s & UPA’s indifference towards the need for long-pending legislations, apart from MSP law.
Of the many pending legislations on agriculture, 5 deserve special mention: a new seed law, new pesticides law, a comprehensive fertiliser law, biotechnology regulatory authority law and agricultural biosecurity legislation.
Farmers are baffled at the majestic failure of all regimes from British Raj to Modi Government to compute bare minimum economical prices below which sale of vegetables and fruits becomes losing proposition.
Hence peasants’ justifiable suspicion about Union Government’s offer to set up a committee to study their demand for MSP law. This is because the term MSP has been left out of two new farm laws including one relating to contract farming. The existing rules pertaining to contract farming under Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC) Act in few States stipulated MSP-linked private transactions. Prime Minister Narendra Modi was once himself a champion of MSP in transactions between farmers and private entities. This is reflected in the 2011 Report of Chief Minister's Working Group (WG) on Consumer Affairs constituted by UPA regime chaired by Mr. Modi as Gujarat CM.
WG recommended: “Enforce MSP since intermediaries play a vital role in the functioning of the market and at times, they have advance contract with farmers. In respect of all essential commodities, we should protect farmer's interest by mandating through statutory provisions that no farmer-trader transaction should be below MSP, wherever prescribed”.
There are other reasons too for farmers’ distrust over Government’s offer to assure in writing that MSP would not be phased out. First, the Government ruled out enacting such a law in reply to a parliament question raised during July 2019. It was perhaps raised after Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) recommended such a legislation in March 2018.
Read more: White Paper on MSP: Enact Agricultural Prices Stabilization Act
- Created on 16 July 2018
Farming and farmers’protests are as intertwined as oxygen and hydrogen atoms in the water molecule. This is because the road to agriculture is paved with potholes and ditches of policy failures; inadvertent and some deliberate. Friction, jerks and, at time, big jolts in form of mass agitations seem inevitable.India’s latest tryst with a farmers’ strike was far more significant: it was about taking the voice of the farmer to the people, not to political leaders or policy makers; it was about exposing the core of a critical crisis that will hit the aam aadmi, even if it leaves the politician unscathed, save at the hustings perhaps.
Farmers in Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat,Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Punjab and Haryana put together a united front for a 10-day “gaon bandh” starting Friday, June 1, sending a message to urban India about what it would be like not to have their supplies of essential items like milk and vegetables. Their demands were many, from loan waiver to right price for their crops and the implementation of the Swaminathan Commission recommendations. In Madhya Pradesh, the farmers declared a complete shutdown of supplies to cities.
Farmers wage periodic fights for their rights across the world. The struggle ranges over the right to get inputs including water; to the right to save crops and livestock, farmland and life. No wonder certain states such as Michigan in the United States have enacted the Right to Farm Act to protect farming and farms. Modern and medieval histories are replete with instances of farmers’ resentment that at times have exploded into uprisings. In current times, one witnesses more of agrarian grudges venting themselves in frequent street protests.
- Created on 20 February 2018
Would acronyms-laden growth model of Modi Government deliver magic during the forthcoming elections to certain state assemblies and the Lok Sabha?
Prime Minister Narendra Modi continues to bank on new acronyms, renaming and repackaging of schemes. The other day he spun acronym ‘TOP’ at a BJP rally in Karnataka to woo distressed farmers.
Mr Modi reportedly said: “If you go to any corner of India, you will find three vegetables — tomato, onion and potato. That is why I call it top priority — the T of tomato, the O of Onion and the P of potato — TOP priority. Keeping these farmers in my mind, we announced Operation Greens in the Budget. Like how Amul is a model in the milk sector for enhancing the income of dairy farmers, Operation Greens will assure incomes for tomato, onion, potato… and all vegetable farmers.”
Any student of agriculture would tell you that all policy and institutional elements of TOP and Operation Greens already exist. There is nothing new in them.
On the contrary, Modi Government’s commitment to these elements has been either lacking or shrinking right from the very first year of its tenure. This is one of the main causes of worsening agrarian distress.
‘TOP’ and ‘Operation Greens’ need to be studied with clinical precision to prove that the duo is nothing but yet another Jumla (empty promise). To put bluntly, duo is nothing but yet another attempt to fool the farmers.
To arrive at the jumla conclusion, we have to start with promises made by BJP in its 2014 Lok Sabha Manifesto and how they have been acted upon so far.
Read more: Time to Shift Focus from Acronyms to gaps in Performance
