Pesticide Usage in India

Recently, I was asked to look into the role of agri-chemicals on food security. While looking into data I observed the continuous decline of pesticide/insecticide usage since 1990s. I had heard about this sometime ago from Dr Keshav Raj Kranthi, Director, Central Institute of Cotton Research (CICR), Nagpur and to clarify my doubt I called him up. He had ready reference and the data in his fingertips. He told that in 1990 the pesticide usage had reached to around 70,000 tonne and that was also the year when Integrated Pest Management (IPM) started and by 1994 the usage had come down to around 60,000 tonne and we also moved to Insecticide Resistance Management (IRM) and then in 2002 we started with Bt Cotton (which was effective for American Bollworm) and the usage of pesticide further reduced to around 40,000 tonne by 2006, the year when sucking pest started becoming a problem and in recent years there might have been slight increases in pesticide usage.

Courtesy: Personal telephonic communication with Dr Kranthi, who has also received the International Cotton Researcher of the Year in 2009.
The figures have also been tallied with indiastat.

Rational Fools

Rational fools, is the tile of a seminal paper by Amartya Sen which I read quite sometime ago and I will not deal with it here, but got reminded of this because of a recent seminar. The essence of the presentation was based on a fact that on average, one particular sub-group (individual investor) made losses whereas another sub-group (institutional investor) made profit. Superimposing a definition of rationality/irrationality with profit/loss, the conclusion is that individual investors are irrational. And by extension, they are 'fools'.

Nevertheless, a few questions keep bothering. Are investors behaviour of rationality/irrationality to be judged by outcomes alone? If size of the pie is increasing then what prevents both sub-groups from making profit? Is there no role of uncertainty, information asymmetry, transaction costs, rent seeking and so on and so forth? These questions were put aside because they were outside the purview of the model or without empirical basis or pure semantics. Lest one gets further bewildered, this is a journey from irrational fools to rational fools.

People, Markets and Democracy

Being pro-people is not the same as being anti-market, but, it is definitely not being 'pro-market'. It is, rather, for markets where people matter. Thus, like a democratic government, markets should be by the people, for the people and of the people.
The irony is that peoples representatives in a democratic set-up are being 'market-friendly' so that they can buy people, be far from them and off their radder. Be forewarned, that if people become irrelevant then it is neither good for democracy nor for markets.