Urea and price hike ?

Urea fertilizer, also known as carbamide, is the most important nitrogenous fertilizer. It is a white crystalline organic chemical compound containing about 46 percent nitrogen. It is a waste product formed naturally by metabolizing protein in humans as well as other mammals, amphibians and some fish. Synthetic urea is produced commercially from ammonia and carbon dioxide. Urea is widely used in the agriculture sector both as a fertilizer and animal feed additive, which makes the production of urea considerably high in comparison to other fertilizers.

Urea was first discovered by a French scientist, named Hillaire Rouelle in 1773. But, synthetic urea was started to produce in 1828, about 55 years after its discovery.Urea has the highest nitrogen content, equal to 46 percent. This percentage is much higher than other nitrogenous fertilizers available in the market.Urea can be used for all types of crops and soils. After its assimilation by plants, urea leaves behind only carbon dioxide in the soil through the interaction of nitrifying bacteria. This carbon dioxide does not harm the soil.Urea is readily blended with monoammonium phosphate or diammonium phosphate. But, urea must not be mixed with any superphosphate unless applied immediately after blending, because urea reacts with superphosphate liberating water molecules. This will produce a damp material that is hard to store and apply.

Presently, urea is decontroled by the Government of India so the price hiked about 25% and a bag which costed 450 to 600 zoomed to 1100 .This is because India is the biggest importer of urea and when Indian agencies go to international market the price in the international market zooms up and the Indian government have to import at a higher price and thus sell it costly .To avoid this situation the government have to make a strategy for buying urea and also the middlemen and corruption element should be removed .If it is possible inflation can be ceased a bit as farmer will sell at a lower price.

A Noble For Mother

Four hours after receiving the news that she had been selected for the Rs.1520000 Nobel Peace Prize,Mother Teresa,Calcutta's "living saint",quietly rode a streetcar wearing a Rs.18 white sari with a blue border and headed for the "Writers' building ,the communist state' secretariat.There she humbly sought an interview with the ever busy chief secretary ,the not so busy peons,unaware that they were talking to a Nobel laureate,brusquely ordered her to "come back later".

Towards the evening ,as tickers in newspaper offices of the city brought the Oslo datelined news,the city bent over backwards to pay homage. However,the sense of pride was largely justified.Mother Teresa,with her Slavonic English and broken but crisply colloquial Bengali,belonged to Calcutta.She could not have helped it because perhaps in no other city is poverty so glaring .No other city ,perhaps ,needs Mother Teresa as much as Calcutta does.

"Its the victory for the poor",was all she said with her wrinkled face resting on her gnarled hand.

Baba Amte :"भिती असते तिथे प्रीति नसते"

Born in Wardha ,Maharashtra ,in 1914 a self made man true to the Gandhian ideals,he accepted the life of a labourer instead of being called land lord for 450 acres of land.He might not be a "Baba"of worshiping but certainly "Guru" for future generations.


Moved towards Vinoba Bhave for its Gandhian philosophy during freedom struggle Murlidhar Devdas Amte learned Bengali to comprihend Tagore's "Geetanjali" to understand pain across all languages.In 1942 Baba took Sadhna tai and family at a new place at Anandvan where service was not provided to the leprosy patients but by the leprosy patients to thousands of visitors and guests.


Baba Amte what he was called because of his inspiration to the People of Punjab in terbulent years of 1984 to 1986 and than he stayed with the masses to strengthen them at the banks of Narmada for a decade to selfless help in the fight against foolish Sardarsarovar dam project.


Baba was physically unwell during his later days due to Spondylosis,in 2007 ,he was diagnosed with Leukemia .On 9th February 2008 Baba Amte breathed his last breath and was buried instead of cremated as per his last wish.Opon Amte's death the 14th Dalai Lama said "Amte's demise is a great loss to all of us.I am an admirer of Baba.I vividly remember my visit to his thriving community of handicapped people at Anandvan in 1990".


Baba Amte was awarded with neumores awards and titles Gandhi had conferred on Amte the title Abhayasadhak for his fight against leprosy .Indian government with 

• Padma Shree, 1971
• Padma Vibhushan, 1986
• Gandhi Peace Prize, 1999 and many more by other institutions .

Dream come true.

The duskey sky in the evening stopped to drink in the beautiful skies the sunset had created.Last few months back  a friend and I walked along the edge of a hilltop forest while a wild wind rushed through the trees and I wondered if the whole wood would blow away. And then, just a day later, we walked through a hilly terrene  where the softly falling rain made the earth smell sweet.


The trees stood quiet and still, large droplets splashed to the ground from the leaves or trickled down the bark, darkening the trunks .The beauty of rain ,the isolated patch of our farm near the town with hilly terrane and streams running sideways with huge ,tall,witthered tree trunks around tempt to hug .it’s like entering another world under the dusky evening skys.


The moon and sun both tussling for their space in the space with twinkles awaiting for there glare the roudy clouds with a lightning blade now and than bring my friend closer to me .The cool breeze with tiny droplets and husk around .I always wanted to be a part of it and today it was the dream come true for me .

Truth and lie !

"Truth always triumphs" the meaning for "Satyamev jayte " which we use to see after almost all the movies ended in the last decayed on doordarshan every Sunday before the 8:45 news .Even in the court scenes there were Satyamev jayte " written behind the judge and even in Ramayana and other epics truth was glorified. We were reminded by our parents to follow it ,saying at last the person who doesn't leave truth and right path leads good life and he is remembered forever.


Now after a decade ,does all those things lost there flair ? as we see almost everyone climbing up the ladder of success through dishonest means .Even the study conducted by University of San Francisco says only 31 people out of 13000 could identify in nearly all cases when someone was lying .People who lie react differently when they lie so there is no set pattern. They can feel afraid, guilt or excitement while lying, it really depends on the person.


So in a age of quick money and using one's shoulder to climb to the top the borderline between telling the truth and lying is something that is hard to come  with even at a young age.The thrill and excitement of telling a lie also sometimes tempt a person to tell a lie for no reason .


Telling a lie and telling a truth both are just telling a sentence but truth has a contentment in it whereas a lie bring a guilt and bad consequences with it so it is only the person who speak and the moment the word or sentence is uttered have the right and responsibility for it .

Oye lucky, lucky oye !

He gets out of his Merc wearing a red sports jacket .The car was parked in the parking area of the hotel with its front facing the gate .He comes out and enquired about room which he wanted to hire for an hour for wash and change .

The rate was quoted and negotiated .An identity proof was asked for and the driving licence was handed over but with in a second it was replaced with voter's card .Than the voter's card of Mr Devendra singh son of Kirpal Singh was scanned thru the scanner and saved with other visitors cards which are mandatory these days after the  Mumbai Blasts .

My wife who was sitting in the lawn watching the whole episode approached me and alerted saying he is Bunty the burglar who was recently seen in a realty show Big boss .I called up one of my friend and asked him to surf about the person and he tipped saying my wife was right .

Meanwhile the so called guest asked for a bottle of mineral water and was looking for his cloths in his car .I went to the car and asked if he was the same person who appeared in Bigg boss and his tone changed saying he was an undercover agent and worked for Interpol he also took out a file and said he wanted to buy some marble and Blah blah blah .He seemed too weired and I was convinced by his behaviour that he was some whom my wife was suspecting so i asked him to pose with me for a photo and he refused saying the Interpol stuff !!!

I thus refused for the room to him but coincidentally was able to scan his identity proof .yet another mistake I anticipated at the right moment because of my better half.

MGNREGA and Rajasthan

Once nominated as the best state for implementation of MGNREGA, Rajasthan has now gone down the chart in the implementation of the flagship scheme of the UPA government. In fact, the irony is that the state got the laurels for the scheme under the Vasundhara Raje government and its fall has come under a Congress government.He argued that the JCB was not an innocent machine but a precursor to big corporate giants eyeing the NREGA’s vast funds. “Mind you, the minute corporates come in, NREGA goes out,”In Rajasthan alone, an estimated Rs. 9,500 crore were spent on NREGA in 2009, making the programme lucrative for big corporates. If they came in, the NREGA would cease to be a wage employment programme.


Prima facie it all seemed too good to be true. As a hack remarked, the selfless MKSS activists, the earnest Collector, a government that would go the extra mile to facilitate the audit, all recalled a 1970s feel-good Doordarshan documentary more than real-time India with its conflicts and confrontations.Behind the impressive grand finale was a history of struggle for accountability in public spending. In a lot of places, the records had to be wrested from reluctant panchayat officials. There were also showdowns between the sarpanchs and the auditors at many of the jan sunwais held on the penultimate day.The sarpanch-villager collusion worked like this: The sarpanch and his acolytes would hire the JCB machine to cut down time and labour, yet fudge the record books to show full employment and extended periods of work, thus earning huge sums of money for no labour at all. Obviously, the conspiracy excluded the bulk of the workers in whose names the wages were drawn.


 In Taswaria, the village heads insisted on being spared punishment for wrongdoings, unmindful of the presence of Minister Bharat Singh.The social auditors confronted irregularities almost everywhere, and these went well beyond the expected complaints around delayed and stalled payment of wages. Job cards, required by law to be in the beneficiaries’ possession, were routinely withheld by the panchayat staff, resulting in NREGA workers not being able to claim what they earned. NREGA is premised on simple transparency, an example being the use of village walls to display work and payment details so that these become public knowledge. Yet the auditors repeatedly found fake muster rolls, bare walls and misplaced job cards. The material used in construction work was substandard and record books showed inflated figures against usage.


The roadblocks that the  social audit teams faced cannot however detract from the achievements of the exercise, which for the first time ever united two sections conventionally at loggerheads: civil society and government.And obviously the irregularities we witnessed  were nothing compared to the situation  where NREGA was struggling to get off the ground.    “Yes, there are irregularities but I would think these form a small proportion of NREGA work. More to the point, through years of struggle we have institutionalised a system of transparency which ensures against big scams.We have shown that given political will, resistance can be beaten down.”