Why Cities AND Farmers suffer? The real story.

Well the main reason why cities in India are neglected is because politicians from the time of Nehru have thought of India as a agricultural economy. Our cities were neglected saying 70% of the population lives in villages.( Well 30% in cities is a considerable number, God knows how they ignored it). Next came the land reforms. Give land to those who till it, they said. Well each farmer ended up with less than 5-6 acres of land. This turned agriculture uneconomical. Then came the green revolution, asking farmers to use expensive fertilizers. This made farms even more uneconomical.
Some may be arguing that it raised the yield. Yes yield increased, but only in the short term, vast areas of land today have turned too saline to be used due to excessive use of fertilizers. And although yield increased nobody bothered calculating that the cost of producing PER TONNE had also gone up. Now to save the farmers the politicians threw away money on schemes such as free power. The Vidharba Package(Maharashtra) is a classic example, all that money should have been used to build dams and canals so that the farmers get water, solving the root cause of their problems. In the end the state takes all the revenue it gets from cities and sends it to the rural areas. The net result? Our cities are cash starved. No money=No Development.
Recently the Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme has been launched, it will make labour more expensive for the farmers, compounding their problems.

Give a man fish and he eats for a Day, but teach him to fish and he feeds himself for a lifetime goes a saying. Our Politicians delebrately do not teach fishing to farmers(i.e. GIVE them WATER) so that the farmers keep asking for 'Relief Packages' and the politicans can come and 'Give' the package in a grand way.

Suggested Reading:

• http://edugreen.teri.res.in/explore/bio/green.htm
• http://www.iisc.ernet.in/currsci/feb25/articles16.htm (Very long article but worth reading)
• http://rural.nic.in/lr.htm (Very interesting site, by Govt. of India. It only mentions how much land has been 'Distributed' but does not comment on the effects this distribution has on agricultural Production).