I am not any expert in development of any country, but I can't help thinking about the reasons why our country is not as developed as it should have been or what are the biggest challenges in our development. Working in IT industry, the first thing that comes to my mind is the poor self confidence and the follower attitude (looking at western world for things to follow especially white world and never thinking about creating things by ourselves). However going to the grassroots level, the two things that come to my mind are primary education and the food distribution. I guess everyone will agree with me that a country is not developed until quality of life of everyone in country has improved. Rich people getting richer is not development. I wrote something about primary education in first part of the State of Education in India article of my blog. Food distribution or storage is almost ignored or neglected problem. It came to light when few years ago there was enormous amount of grains were rotting in the FCI godowns, and as always 30% of India was struggling to get food both times of the day. Keeping aside all the corruption and all the other reasons leading to such situation, the question that we need to ask is whether the situation is any different with private players. I remembered when 4 years back I tried to study Public Distribution System (PDS) in India, I had found references that even with private players the food losses due to poor storage facilities is very high. I tried to find some references on the internt, mostly I was getting PDS or FCI references and then I hit this, article as fresh as April 10, 2008. Can we really afford to have such stupendous losses with our 30% of population below poverty line, and even lower middle class facing the brunt of the rising prices of food grains and fruits?
As many foreign private players coming in India, everybody thought the things will change, there will be another kind of agriculture revolution in India, there will be marked increase in the selling of processed food, and these companies taking charge of food produce will lower some of the wastage of the food, but it is yet to happen. When we have Indians in most of the best education Institutes in the world and also in the most of the biggest and best companies in the world, why we don't have solution for a problem like food storage and distribution?
The losses happen in storage, transport and astonishingly also due to poor storage practices. Clearly there is something missing here, the people who are in-charge of storage and transportation do not seem to care much. Wouldn't it help to build effective and efficient food storage systems than providing free TVs, free power and such things? One of the things that is true about Indian agricultural system is the presence of middle men, who transfer food grains and fruits from farmers to wholesalers, retailers or food processing industry and make enormous amount of money in between. Despite all high prices, it is never the farmers who get benefited by it (don't count the big farmers with acres and acres of land, who despite being rich take all the farming related benefits from Government). Is it possible that these middle men are careless about storage as they are not the ones who are doing the real hardwork nor the ones who actually have to sell to end customers, they have their quick money in the post-harvesting season? I don't know, I have hardly been in rural areas, I don't know how exactly things work. I only know, someone who knows these things must let everyone know what exactly happens so that someone can think of some solution. It is ridiculous to lose food through storage and transport. How do we expect to develop as a country when significant population of our country is hungry and we are wasting 30% of our food grains and fruits through storage and transport.
Coming back to PDS, well we need to fix that also. But, it will be more difficult than fixing the private players situation.