Sept_13

“On realising that rubber farmers
were being cheated by middlemen,
I launched keralafarmeronline.com,
a comprehensive guide that is
followed not just by farmers, but
researchers and businessmen”
“After realising that rubber farmers are being cheated by
middlemen, I started my crusade to uncover how this
happens,” reveals Nair, who lives in Peyad in Thiruvananthapuram.
“When I approached authorities like the Rubber
Board, I was up against a wall. They were simply not
prepared to share any information with me. That is why
I started using the RTI Act.”
It’s a long way from being a havaldar in the Indian Army
to becoming a blogger. So how did the 50-something
ex-serviceman-cum-farmer turn to the World Wide Web?
“It was a very slow transition,” remembers Nair, with a
disarming smile. “I am a matriculate and not very good in
English,” he confesses, adding that he is conversant in Malayalam
and Hindi.
Photographs by Vivek R Nair
Nair’s introduction to the information superhighway
was gradual and started with help from his daughter and
nephew. In 2000, he started sharing his thoughts on rubber
marketing on 4me, a web platform made available by a
nephew of his in the IT field. Once he got the hang of the
Web and fell in love with its seemingly magical ways, Nair
started posting articles relating to rubber trade and statistics
on Geocities of Yahoo! before he switched to blogging
platforms in 2005. After he became proficient at blogging,
in both English and Malayalam, Nair joined several groups
of bloggers. “This helped me learn a lot of Web applications.
All the youngsters and other bloggers helped familiarise
me with innovations in the blogosphere.”
His big moment came in 2008, when he launched the blog
keralafarmeronline.com. “It is a comprehensive guide for
farmers as well as researchers and businessmen as it contains
in-depth details and official statistics on rubber production,
exports, costs, etc,” reveals Nair. A critic of unfair
trade practices and a campaigner against exploitation, Nair
regularly monitors the statistics released by various governmental
agencies like the Rubber Board. “These figures
provide a clear indication on how farmers are being cheated
by intermediaries. Not only businessmen, but even the
authorities have a role in this. These doctored figures and
calculations are enough to understand the extent to which
small-scale farmers are being cheated.”
This realisation compelled Nair to use the RTI Act to dig
deeper into malpractices and make a series of applications
to the Rubber Board. “I have never got a satisfactory reply,”
he says with a wry laugh. But that has only strengthened
his resolve. The answers to his queries have also provided
subtle clues to areas of corruption and undercurrents in
the trade. Naturally, all this goes up on his blog. The website
gets a minimum of 150 hits on any given day, with most
of the traffic directed toward the daily prices of rubber.
Nair is almost obsessive about updating his blog. Armed
with accurate data including daily price fluctuations, he
knows that people are less likely to fall prey to the wily
ways of middlemen. “Those who visit my blog are not only
farmers but business groups and even researchers,” he says.
“There was this MBA student who once thanked me be-
harmony celebrate age september 2013 35