Kerala and food security

Recently food securiy of kerala came to lime light due declining sotck pile of rice in the state which price rise of essential commodities and a decrease in central pool of rice quota. Adding spark to the dynamate came American president George bush' remark on price rise of food and its roots in india.

Now All politicians and polically sponsored think tanks in economy wanted hier piece of pie in lime light by George bush bashing.

Why are they forgetting the basics, I woul like to attention back to kerala food security and its causes. Just 20-30 years before tapioca, jackfruit, platain,yum,sweet potato consisted of 50% of staple diet of an average keralite. Now it is not even 5%, food habits of keralites have changed so drastically due to non availabilty of these items. shortage of these food items where seen even before shortage of rice came to notice what are the reasons. The major reason is during 30 years there was a silent revolution in agriculture scenario of a migration from food crops to cash crops.Of these rubber can have the first position,rubber during last many years spread ike wild fire eating into the traditional territories of food crops and now it is vanilla and the like.

I would argue that if there is a food security problem due to convertion from food crops to cash crops, kerala has been a front runner, due to which kerala from being a producer of food crops shrinked itself to become a consumer of food grains from other state, We cannot blame any one not america or any other states but ourselfs to blame. All the governments ignored the food scenario on of the state on the behalf of cash crop farmers.

In conclusion i would like to say
The current problem has 2 parts
1. change in food habits, over dependency on grains.
2. decrease in food crops cultivation.

So the solution lies within go back to basics.
1.Eat more traditional food and reduce the dependancy on food grains.
2. make available more land for food crop cultivation, that may require a change in policy of making available more land for cash crops.

A full object oriented hibernate Entity gives you better results

The importance of object oriented design principles has been again and again by many hibernate gurus, but then also you find designs again and again that are non compliant with OOD. this makes it less possible to make scalable and maintainable applications.

Basically while designing applications you may have 2 different approaches. 1. is start from an available database degsin. 2. build from scratch a full OO System. In both cases the hibernate can help you design applications with reusable components. If you are not using a normalized database then the problem of data duplication begins to haunt you once it is in maintenance phase. here all hibernate can be of good help if you have a good OO Design of entity which will surely help you to reduce efforts in code maintenance.Serious efforts should be made to reduce code duplications of entities. where by you can make sure data is not duplicated in amoung entities. Here i wish to point out a strategy to avoid code duplication based on OO Principle of inheritance which has helped me and is sure to help you.

Imagine you have 2 tables A and B with redundant data where most of the fields except some fields are common due to some reason. In this case you may use inheritance using an abstract parent class and 2 child classes. These child classes can override the properties of the parent if there is any data difference between the siblings. example the Id. and also they may have their own properties in addition. The main advantage of this approach is 1) you have less code to maintain. 2) by using polymorphism you can use the parent to access the child data.
Even though i disagree to the database design that produced such an entity design, i overcame most of the difficulties of the bad database design with the above model The above sitaution can be examplified by the following hbm file.

<hibernate-mapping>

    <class name="AbstractItem" abstract="true">

                          

        <id name="id" column="ID" type="long">

            <generator class="native"/>

        </id>

                     

        <property name="name" column="name" type="string"/>

        <property name="code" column="code" type="string"/>

        <property name="eAN" column="ean" type="string"/>

                          

        <union-subclass name="TempItem" table="temp_item">

            <property name="state" column=”state” type="short"/>

       </union-subclass>

        <union-subclass

           name="ApprovedItem" table="approved_item">

            <property name="approverId" column=”appover_id” type="long"/>

            <property name="pack" column=”pack” type="short"/>

            <property name="dimension" column=”dimesion” type="string"/>

        </union-subclass>

    </class>

</hibernate-mapping>



Hartal is back some thoughts

Yet another hartal is going on tday sposered by BJP the major opposition party of inddia yes it causes numerous troubles to indians. each of these hartals brings with it incidents of violence and prevents free movement of people and goods across the country for a day. which by iteslf brings losses worth millions of ruppees. let alone dmages caused by acts of violence durng the hartal by supporters of hartal.

You cannot playdown price rise by not supporting hartal, yes it is a reality ging on for lats 2 years. if it makes sense to you let me just give my personal experience on price rise. I used to work in cochin for last 14 months. when i wen ther the cost of tea +a snack was just 4.50 Rs while now the same cost me 7.50 Rs. This alone tells you a story of price rise in itself and how it have affected the people across the state. the state government have so far failed to tackle the problem. and so is the center government. you may see the same scene in every state. the house hold items that i used to buy for 5000Rs costs me around 9000Rs now.

If you see the policy of state government on price rise it seems to me contradictory. they are saying that price of essential commodities thatis purcahsed from other states is not a good trend but at the same time supporting the price rise of home agricultural produces including oil, spices, rubber and paddy. how can you seperate price rise like that no one knows.

most of the time the prise rise of an item may have an effect on other either on consumer perspective or business perspective. in general you cannot round certain commodities from price rise while keeping others open for price.

In conclusion i would like to say ther should be check in price rise of essential commodities and make it available at prices that are affordable to common man without forgetting that farmers are major chunk of indian population.

from kerala india

Trivandrum technopark an employees view

Of late i have been doing my rounds in trivandrum technopark, Yes it is one of the best places in the world to work no doubt. but don't forget the basics.

High price of food.
the difference between the food prices in and out technopark is quite noticable at lunch time to see a stream of people leaving for outside eateries. i will say the difference in food price between the restaurants inside the technopark is also high as 25%.

Commuting from and to Technopark
If the company provides you commutation facilities it is good. but if not better opt for going in your own vehicle, which will take you faster and cheaper to your destination. High autorickshaw fares is noticable. if you disembark at karyavattom side the autorickshaw drivers may charge you a minimum of 20 Rs to Technopark. There is nothing much you can do to controll them as in else where in kerala.

Facilities inside technopark
If your office is situated in older building you may have full facilities including restaurants. common areas etc. but newerones like Thejeswini may be in up comming stage. with less commn areas.