Dev Kamal Dutta

Farmers toil ceaselessly year after year in the verdant soil to cultivate food. Providing for the masses, their own struggle continues every single day, striving for a mere existence; battling with poverty. Their burdens only too evident in the lines on their faces. The vendors that obtain their crops at moderate prices sell ahead at phenomenal profits, often to export to other places (where demand is high in comparison to the supply) and reap huge dividends that never trickle down to the producers who expend their lives in scarcity… These cultivators provide us rice, a grain which is related with Laxmi – The Goddess of wealth, but their reality is ironic, since ‘farmers’ and ‘wealth’ are two words that rarely coincide.