Chapter 408 Method

Devaram gathered the villagers in an open space at the foot of the mountain, where Muna gave a speech in front of several jagged, twisted, and gnarled palm trees, while hundreds of women and men sat on the lawn.

He didn't speak in a loose, unstructured manner like a public speaker, but was focused and connected to his audience.

Muna told the villagers that a seed company would be opened soon, which would solve the farmers' seed and fertilizer problems and provide loans when necessary.

Such a promise naturally aroused cheers. He was a minister after all, and he couldn't lie to people.

The villagers didn't care even if they were cheated. This was the first time in so many years that such a big shot had visited Kazi Village, so they just watched the fun.

Muna didn't care. He could understand the farmers' thoughts. Every time there was a general election, politicians always made various promises.

Before the election, everyone said they were from the countryside, but after the election they turned around and went back to the city and never came back to the countryside.

Muna knew it would take time to get them to open up, but he wasn't in a hurry because the Progressive Party would soon address the two major challenges.

Once the seeds and fertilizers are in place, farmers will naturally trust you. In a way, they are actually very simple.

Muna and Devaram also went to the fields where the villagers were working. They walked along the narrow square ridges, and had to avoid the manure left by the farmers during their work.

They saw a little boy hunched over the trunk of a low palm tree, shaking an earthenware jar. He was collecting palm sap, not to sell it but to take home and drink it himself.

Muna took a closer look. The liquid had a pungent smell and was gray in color, and the jar was covered with ants.

He continued walking and passed a depression filled with weeds. It was a pond, but it had dried up ten years ago.

Most farmers use diesel pumps to pump water, but these pumps are expensive, costing around 50,000 rupees each, not including the installation cost.

The small installation company hired by the farmers charges 150 rupees for each foot of excavation, but to pump out groundwater, one must dig at least 250 feet.

But even then, water might not be found, so several holes usually had to be drilled in different places. Each hole cost a lot of money, which put the farmers even deeper into debt.

This area is far away from the Ganges, and the old irrigation canals that lead there have been blocked countless times along the way.

During the dry season, only the Ramganga River in the south can provide a small amount of water. However, influenced by the market, farmers have switched from growing millet to cotton, corn and soybeans, but these three crops are very water-intensive.

The government promised to build irrigation canals on 10 million acres of arable land. However, four years later, a local expert told Muna that although 60 million rupees had been paid to the contractor, not a single meter of irrigation canal had been seen.

Muna was not surprised. If he had not been keeping an eye on it, the irrigation canals in the east might have had the same fate.

The desperate need for water among nearby farmers has led them to dig wells in a desperate attempt to find it, part of a disturbing nationwide trend.

Muna once read a foreign report that pointed out that the number of water wells in India has increased sharply from 2 million to 23 million in 20 years.

If you dig too deep, the water that comes out is salty, which will cause arsenic pollution. This phenomenon has already occurred in the agriculturally developed states of West Bengal and Punjab.

“As water sources dried up and wells were abandoned, farmers began killing each other and committing suicide,” sighs Devaram.

"Where else can I get water nearby?" Muna asked.

"That lake in the mountains. But you can't use that water. As you can see, it will poison all the crops."

Muna was speechless. As the Minister of Industry, he could not order those pharmaceutical factories to stop production.

Once the farmers' problems are solved, the workers' problems will arise again.

Besides, who would interfere with factory production for the sake of insignificant farmers?

"Indian newspapers are filled with stories of farmers committing suicide out of despair due to poverty, debt and drought," says Devaram.

A recent inspection of Uttar Pradesh by the Indian Planning Commission revealed that irrigation canals there were stagnant and water storage for irrigation had been greatly reduced.

As a result, the number of irrigation wells is growing exponentially, especially in the central and eastern regions, where water depletion is leading directly to farmer suicides.

For Devaram, it was all part of his life. In the previous year, three farmers around him had committed suicide due to debts of hundreds of thousands of rupees.

Most of these debts were incurred when digging wells to find water, as only water could allow them to continue agricultural production.

Even Devaram's own life is quite unstable. He starts working at four o'clock every morning, feeding two buffaloes first, and then goes to the fields with his wife at six o'clock. He brings his own simple lunch, which includes rice, vegetables, dal, etc.

They take a break at nine o'clock, have lunch at two o'clock in the afternoon, and finish work and go home at six o'clock in the evening.

His wife went home to cook, and he chatted with other villagers in the small teahouse until eight o'clock.

In good years, Devaram could earn 20,000 to 30,000 rupees a year, but that income was not guaranteed, and it was entirely possible that he owed that much money.

Even if he made money, he had to consider his large family and make ends meet: his parents, his wife, three daughters, and a son, aged between 5 and 15.

Fortunately, he is also the head of the agricultural union, and occasionally organizes villagers to make handmade cigarettes to supplement their family income.

Thanks to his reputation, Devaram has connections in dozens of nearby villages. He even plans to sell his family's land and go to a nearby city to engage in garment processing.

He planned to rent a place, buy a few sewing machines, and then make some cheap shirts to sell to the market.

But his wife disagreed. She persuaded Devaram to study elections and then use his expertise to become the elector of the area in the general election.

As luck would have it, he met Ron at the demonstration last year, and then met Muna.

Devaram knew this was his chance, so he took Munna around and introduced him to the villagers in the nearby village.

Naturally, Devaram accepted Munna's invitation and joined the Progressive Party.

From now on, he is the Progressive Party representative in the Heldoi area and is fully responsible for the party's development work here.

As the party leader, Muna also visited other nearby villages to understand the various living conditions of local villagers.

Some villagers live in two-story concrete buildings with lots of wood piled up in the yard, which they picked up from the forest for burning.

From the outside, the conditions looked quite good, but Devaram said that the villager's family had just moved in not long ago.

This house was built thirty years ago. Its owner worked as a laborer in the village doctor's house for twenty years and used the money he saved to build this house.

In fact, in order to pay off his debts, the man hardly lived here, but had been working and making money in the Gulf area.

Devaram had also traveled to Dubai, as had millions of South Asian migrants for work.

Villagers who went there to find such jobs had to pay the middleman a commission of 50,000 rupees, and then a dozen villagers left Herdoi together. This was the first time they left home.

They first took a train to Mumbai and were stranded there for a week while waiting for the documents to be prepared.

They slept in a small room for a week because they had little money and had to pay a large debt to the middleman.

They wanted to see the city they had seen many times in movies, but ultimately resisted the urge.

On the night before they were about to board the ship to Dubai, they were handed over to a man who looked like a foreman.

After arriving in Dubai, they worked on a construction site, working nine hours a day, six days a week, with only Friday off.

They lived in labor tents, which they described as "double hatias," or bunk beds.

The workers try to avoid going into the city, and after just two years of working here, they can earn back the money they use to pay off their debts and save an additional 50,000 rupees.

Many people used the money to build houses and install wells in their fields.

The village had lost power, so to escape the heat, they sat outside Devaram's house.

The neighbors were listening to their conversation, among them was a short man with glasses and a bitter face.

Devaram downplayed the situation in the Persian Gulf countries, but the man next to him said, "He doesn't tell you how bad it is there."

As he said this, his eyes were sharp.

“There’s no need to go into so much detail.” Devaram smiled and shook his head.

The man, Janardan, a village shoemaker, leaned over to Muna and said he had worked for years in Dubai and Saudi Arabia.

“It’s horrible there,” he said. “The Arabs hate us. We have to pay the brokers a lot of money and do a lot of hard work, but in the end we get nothing.”

However, they had no choice and last year he sent his son to Dubai to work as an electrician, paying a middleman 80,000 rupees.

He borrowed the money, and in just one year, the principal and interest turned it into 100,000 rupees.

"It feels like you're racing against a clock that's running faster than you are." He said and sat back down, turning his head to look out at the endless wilderness.

Muna asked him if he could make money as a shoemaker in the village.

He looked at Devaram and smiled. "The villagers never had the money to make new shoes. Everyone went barefoot. My wife made 500 rupees a month rolling cigarettes, and we lived on that."

As Minister of Industry, Muna knew that the only way to solve the problem was to turn farmers to factories.

There is no future in India by relying on farming, you can only barely survive.

Industrialization is the ultimate answer, but it is so difficult to achieve.

Not to mention Uttar Pradesh, Muna feels immense pressure even to improve the lives of farmers in the Kazi village area.

All he can do now is help local farmers solve their seed and fertilizer problems, that's all.

Perhaps only Mr. Soul has the power to change everything.

Muna secretly considered in his mind how to report this matter to Mr. Sur.

While his subordinates in Uttar Pradesh were actively expanding the party's territory, Ron was also busy running his own business in New Delhi.

(End of this chapter)