Survival Loops

This one was pending since a while. Michael Higgins who owns an interesting blog called Chocolate and Gold Coins recently wrote a nice post - "Why farming is no fun?". He makes an appealing argument in terms of "elasticity in demand". I can't quite summarise it over here. Read it there. It's quite interesting.

Towards the end of the post he suggests, like many others, that farmers should look for other employment options. Quite sensible. No doubt there are too many people farming and that's a very important reason why farming is not a profitable business. He also suggests, like a few others, that entrepreneurs can help in retraining farmers for other jobs like plumbing, and that they can pay back the entrepreneur later, once they start a new job. The obvious questions here would be- why would someone invest the money in training? What would they get back? and anyway what is the collateral security? And so on.

However, there is a different question that intrigues me. Coincidentally, a comment that Prof left on an earlier post almost reflects my ideas. He says - "...the way many social loops function here, it is almost as though people don't want to come out of survival loops! They are too afraid to face a reality that says that things can be better..". Very valid point indeed. Perhaps there are economically more secure options. Perhaps some private organisations or the government or some enthusiastic individuals will help them help themselves. But why do we keep on observing that people don't want to get out of their conventional mould even when they know it does not work? Do they feel that the risk involved in choosing a new mode of life is too high? Or are there some other factors? I don't really know the answers. Here, I'll only mention some of my observations in this light.
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It rained quite well in North Karnataka this year. It was a huge relief after three consecutive years of drought. During the prolonged drought many villagers in and around my village were unemployed. Bigger farmers could survive and let the drought pass. But marginal farmers and those who used to work in others' farms had an extremely difficult time. Around the same time there was a national highway being laid near one of my cousins' village. So a lot of people from that place took a sensible decision of working as dailywagers for that company which was working on the highway. They were getting paid pretty well. The wage was more than what they would get working in farms. The drought continued and the road work proceeded as well. The workers moved along, with their family, and started working in Kolhapur (in Maharashtra, about 120KM from their place).

A couple of times when I had gone there during the time of the drought, I had heard about this. However, during my last visit, a few months ago, I found that most of them had stopped working for the highway and had come back. My cousin said, "It has started raining. So, they have come back!". The road work was just a make shift arrangement. Their vocation is agriculture. I was a little irritated about this. After all these guys had been living out of their village for about two years and had settled reasonably well. They were also earning well. It has just started raining. What is the guarantee that it will rain as well to give them a good crop? What is the point of living under the delusion that this is what we are destined for?
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Sometimes they look for new and nonconventional options too. A lot of kids of my generation went to school. However, they used to stop sooner ot later; 4th, 7th, 10th. Very few went ahead to Pre University College (the +2 equivalent). They took "Arts" as their subject there , not because they are inclined towards arts. Then they would do a BA. The next logical step would be to do a Teacher's Certificate Higher (TCH) Course, or a Bachelors in Education (BEd). TCH is the more common option. It doesn't come cheap either. People pay rupees 60-70 thousand as donation before joining. The idea is that after a TCH getting a high school teacher's job is easy. It's not very easy. But the chances become better. You got to take your chances, of course. After all, a government job is a government job.

Another lucrative option is public transport. A lot of jeeps and maxi cabs shuttle between villages and the nearest taluk centre. Some teenagers who drop out of schools start their fast track life as 'cleaners' in one of the jeeps or maxi cabs. They are keen observers and ready learners. Over a period of time they will know all the tricks in the trade and graduate as drivers. The next task for a lot of these drivers is clear cut. To get a government job; a driver's job in the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC). The attrition rate is quite high in this industry. In fact, I know a lot of people from my village who are drivers in KSRTC and some in BMTC also. This job doesn't come cheap either. It takes a lakh or two!
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We all exist in one or more survival loops. Sometimes we move from one loop to another because we feel the latter is better in some way than the former. There is always a cost involved in such a transition. We try to choose the "best" from a set of loops that we think are much worthier than the cost involved in the transition. But would it not be great if we can also see farther than the immediate costs and gains, lest "better" or "best" are only delusions and we forever get stuck in the same survival loop? Of course, one excuse we can give is that of awareness or a lack of it. Or we can trace that back to education or the lack of it. However, education is not a necessary condition for "common sense", it is not sufficient either. But then there are some things that don't let people choose a better life. They are not very clear to me.

Crossposted on Desicritics. By the way, those guys have chosen me as the Desicritic of the Day. Thanks a lot guys!