Much has changed in India in the last two decades. One is the way concern for the farmer seems to have fallen off the political agenda, and the pages of newspapers. Go through a week of a major newspaper in India and see how many times you find the words and phrases – farmer, rabi, kharif, rain-fed, rural indebtedness, fractured land-holdings, scarcity of seeds, procurement price, etc. I would guess that in an average week these words would be hard to find. Their absence tells a story – not just of the neglect by the media of a sector that concerns the majority of people in this country, but the direction the Indian media has chosen to take. From a time when the media understood its role in India, we now have a situation where the media has chosen to ignore a whole slew of issues and events, treating them as non-news.
Farzana Nigar
Ranchi, Jharkhand