Binu Alex, Commodity Online
Last month I put my two kids into my small car and drove some 50 kilometers on the outskirts of the Ahmedabad and reached an agriculture field where castor seed plantation was in full swing. I did this because my kids had no idea how the vegetables they consume on a daily basis are grown. So basically it was a study tour.

Of course, they are a little higher than what qualifies as toddlers but the level of their knowledge on ground realties baffled me. They were under the impression that agriculture products are part of assembly line products that they already have – toy trains and Barbie dolls – produced at will whenever and wherever demand comes from.

It was a bizarre situation for me at the field. Grown up in urban areas, they sympathetically looked at the farmers working in the field and then snared at me. I could read from their eyes that they could not believe when I introduced them as farmers. The farmers they have in their textbooks are glaringly different from what they saw.

Farmers wear turbans, dhotis and are neat and clean in their textbook curriculum. Please each one of them also owns a tractor, a lavish house and prosperous future – as the textbook envisaged for the school kids. But they could see none of these qualities in the rural folks they were eyeing at.

This is trend with most of urban youths. Rural areas are selectively looked upon as an area of poverty and hopelessness. With mud all over the body, unshaven and sunbathed, the farmers are chief protagonists of this soap opera.

And this happens because somewhere something has gone terribly wrong. The primary cause is lack of respect for farmers. This will come only when the growing generation accepts and respects that each grain they consume is the handiwork of some farmer somewhere in the country –many of who are subject to abject poverty.

I was taken aback when I saw a written reply to the Lok Sabha this week by minister of state for human resource development D Purandeswari that the National Curriculum Framework – 2005 for school education has proposed inter-disciplinary approach for syllabi and textbooks integrating components of agriculture and food manufacturing across subjects at all the levels up to class X.

More interestingly she addressed the same dilemma that my kids were facing at the fields. “The syllabi include themes such as ‘Growing Plants’, ‘Growing Food’, ‘Who produces the food we eat?” she remarked.

Though technically the Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) offers “agriculture” as one of the elective subjects for Classes XI and XII across the country, there are hardly any takers. Even if there are, the entire subject matter ends in theoretical jamboree.

There are no practical sessions nor are there any field visits. But on paper in classes VI to X, the syllabi for science include themes related to agriculture such as crop production, plant and animal breeding, selection for quality improvement, use of fertilisers and manures; protection from pests and diseases; organic farming and plant hormones. Syllabi of classes VI to X of Geography include the themes such as types of farming, major crops, and cropping pattern.

Agriculture presents a lot of opportunity which none of the big business schools are teaching. Right from IIM to the entire CAT affiliated B schools, the aim of the curriculum is slavery – to work than to become entrepreneurs. Even the professors and Deans ends up as slaves of multinational companies after their retirement.

Accepted that farming is not something that you can teach in a B School. This is the reason they have Agri-business as one of the subjects, the B Schools would argue. But without agriculture where is the scope of agri-business?

So the buck is most likely to be at the government corridor which has not given enough financial leverage for the small and marginal farmers to grow, irrigation facilities for productive farming, warehousing facilities for better price discovery mechanism and commercial rates based on the merit and market dynamics of the products.

So without providing all these facilities, can the government improve the agri situation by introducing syllabi to the schools?

Beyond Commodities is a casual column by Binu Alex, Editor-in-Chief, Commodity Online Group

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