India Blog

By itself no tool, instrument or invention is good or bad. It is the way we use it that makes it good or bad.

So is the case with television. Television is the most wonderful invention capable of bringing the whole world of entertainment and education to our door. It is the most powerful means of mass communication, capable of revolutionizing man’s life. Since TV programmes appeal to our eyes as well as our ears, they have an irresistible charm.

If, as is the case in India at present, the TV is used mostly as a means of entertainment, information and advertisement, TV programmes are likely to be more harmful than useful. Uneducated people and children remain glued to their seats for hours on end to watch the TV. They become V-addicts. They thus spoil their eyes and their health. They prefer passive entertainment and lose the capacity to enjoy simple, innocent pleasures of life. They cannot enjoy or appreciate natural beauty. Excessive violence shown in the TV films blunts people’s sensitivity to suffering and violence around them. The TV thus becomes a curse for mankind.

But the TV can be used for good purposes like education along with healthy entertainment. Just as a doctor gives sugar-coated pills to his patients, people can be educated through well-prepared and well-presented entertainment programmes. The TV can be used to teach people how to read and write, to teach farmers better methods of cultivation, to teach professional people to improve their professional efficiency, to teach people useful arts and crafts, to provide them useful information about what is happening in other parts of the world and to familiarize them with the latest discoveries, inventions and innovations in different branches of knowledge. TV programmes can also be used to cultivate good tastes and develop healthy interests, to teach people how to appreciate good things of life, to make them aware of their social responsibilities and to arouse people’s interests and enthusiasm in the tasks of national development. TV programmes can reach millions of people in their homes. They can be watched by people at their convenient time if they are prepared in the form of video films. In this respect learning through TV is better than learning in schools and colleges.

In short, if TV programmes are planned to make people better citizens and better human beings, TV then will be a great blessing for mankind.

India is the land of villages. So India’s prosperity and happiness depend upon the prosperity and happiness of its villages.

After independence Indian villages have made some progress. However, a lot more needs to be done for rural development. Villages are still backward and neglected. There is almost total illiteracy, acute poverty, widespread unemployment, scarcity of essential things, lack of basic amenities and absence of public sanitation in almost all villages.

It will require combined efforts of the government, village people and the students to improve the condition of villages. The villagers can provide the necessary men and materials, the government the necessary financial and legal support and the students the necessary leadership and brain work.

The first task is to provide sufficient cultivable land to the farmers. The government should pass and enforce legislation to take away excess land from those who have more land and distribute it among the landless farmers and farmers having insufficient land. The government should start cottage industries and handicrafts connected with agriculture to provide employment to those who do not have land.

Government should also construct a school, a health-centre, a post office, and a panchayat office in every village.

The students should visit the near by villages and teach the villagers how to read and write, the habits of cleanliness and useful arts and crafts. They should persuade people to give up bad habits like smoking and drinking and bad customs like wasteful expenditure, infant marriages,untouchability and unequal matches.

The students should help them in forming a panchayat which would then take up the work of providing basic amenities like water and electricity, and public sanitation like public drainage system, public toilets, etc.

Students should persuade the villagers to form a co-operative society which would provide them loans, buy good seeds, manure and implements and tools and distribute them among the members and make arrangements to sell the farmers’ produces at satisfactory prices. This will improve the economic condition of the farmers.

Thus the face of the Indian villages will change with the comprehensive measures of village development covering all aspects of the village life, viz., social, economic and political.

Floods have become an almost regular annual feature in India. We read reports like the Brahmaputra, the Ganga, the Jamuna, the Narmada, the Tapi and the other small rivers getting flooded almost every year.

Floods may be caused by excessive rainfall in foe catchment area of a river, by earthquake, by breach in a dam. In,North India floods are caused even in summer by the melting of the snow in the Himalayas.

Floods take a heavy toll of life and property. They flood vast areas of land. Low-lying areas are completely submerged in water. People lose all their belongings and become homeless. Standing crop and goods lying in shops, warehouses and factories are destroyed. Roads, railway-lines and bridges are damaged. Means of communication are disrupted. Failure of electricity plunges vast areas into darkness.

People stranded in floods have to remain without food and water for days together.

Floods destroy the uppermost fertile layer of the earth and turn cultivable land barren. This long-term effect of the flood is far more damaging than the other short-term effects.

Even after the flood has receded, it leaves behind a trail of death and destruction. Fallen buildings, breached roads, rail lines and bridges, uprooted trees and telegraph poles, dead bodies of human beings and animals sunk in deep mud present a ghastly sight. Often epidemics like cholera and jaundice spread in the wake of the flood.

Fortunately modern means of transport and communication make it possible to provide quick relief to the victims of flood. Food, medicine and other essential things are air-dropped from helicopters to the people trapped in the flood. Government and voluntary charitable agencies come forward to help and rescue the victims.

Though timely and efficient relief measures go a long way towards mitigating hardships caused to the people by the flood, government should devise long-term measures to prevent the recurrence of floods. These measures include building up of dams, canals and embankments, walls, growing more trees and afforestation.

Government and voluntary agencies should also devise a permanent relief machinery which would provide instant relief to the victims of flood.