Write an article in about 250 Words on "Gratitude towards COVID Warriors This Independence Day"
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“Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic. But destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city”.
— William Jennings Bryan,
‘Cross of Gold’ Speech (1896)
COVID-19 may go down as India’s first ever natural disaster not to register widespread starvation in terms of a total collapse in food consumption levels. About three million people perished in the Great Bengal Famine of 1943. The 1966-67 Bihar famine led to the state’s daily per capita calorie intake dropping from 2,200 to nearly 1,200 in several regions. Maharashtra’s drought of 1972-73 caused an estimated 1,33,000-plus “excess deaths”.
The novel coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing lockdown have had a far wider, nationwide impact. Yet, they haven’t produced the severe food deprivation, soaring prices and hoarding that defined the previous great calamities. We have had reports of stranded migrant workers not getting enough cooked food or dry rations. But these are largely stories of localised administrative neglect, and not comparable to the general lack of access to food seen in past catastrophes.
This time, not only is there no food crisis, the problem has been more about demand than supply. Panic buying of milk, atta, dal, sugar or cooking oil in the initial period of lockdown has given way to demand destruction from the closure of hotels, restaurants, tea stalls, caterers, sweetmeat shops and other business consumers. As a result, producers are the ones really suffering. Even with all the supply chain disruptions, there aren’t too many cases of food not being available in markets or at ration shops, community kitchens and relief camps. People may be hungry, but not starving.
The credit for this not-small transformation goes partly to the much-derided government foodgrain procurement and distribution system. India entered the lockdown with roughly 77 million tonnes (mt) of rice and wheat, plus another 2.25 mt of pulses, in public godowns. But the unsung heroes — without whom all this grain, now being distributed or cooked in food camps, wouldn’t have been produced at all — are the country’s farmers. These women and men have kept supplies going, even without being designated Frontline Corona Warriors.
The abundance of produce that farmers have delivered comes in spite of the many “coronas” faced by them in recent times — from droughts in 2014 and 2015, growing stray cattle menace, an anti-producer inflation-targeting policy and the demonetisation-induced crash in crop realisations. Each time, they have risen, phoenix-like, from the ashes. They weathered the DeMo storm by simply replacing cash with deferred payments for farm inputs. Currently, they are harvesting wheat and sugarcane using whatever labour is available, whether of family members or non-farm workers rendered jobless by the lockdown. Theirs is a tale of resilience and human endurance.
source Indian express.com