Sunita Narain’s back-of-the-envelope calculations in her article “Land is livelihood, don’t forget” (July 18) give revised estimates of betel nut farmers’ annual incomes as Rs 40,000 to 70,000 per household with a landholding of 10 to 30 decimals. In that case, wouldn’t compensation of Rs 28.75 lakh be equal to 40-70 years of annual earnings and not two-three years of earnings as estimated by her in the previous article?
Narain’s assertion that we, the “literate and urban Indians”, lack the ability to comprehend the land-is-my-mother sentiment is supercilious. I, too, am closely attached to my ancestral village in Western UP and disposed of my agricultural land only in the early noughties. Narain’s “sentimentality” argument reminds me of a story in which a car-owner ends up paying huge compensation to a shepherd for running over his lamb simply because the villagers sense this as an opportunity to fleece the rich car-owner. They use the argument that the lamb was the darling of the entire village and that compensation could not be merely based on how much the lamb weighed and the meat it was worth.
Ajay Tyagi, Mumbai
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