In Rajasthan, labour ranks with water on the list of must-haves. Farmer Man Singh of Jaipur had to hire buses to pick up his agricultural labourers from Kishangarh in Ajmer during the kharif harvest season last year and have them dropped back to their homes. "Every year, it becomes harder to find farm labourers," he says.
In Mandana village of Kota, farmers say they cannot hire labour even at Rs 150 per day.
In Rudrapur, farmer Bhupinder Singh Johal is looking as far afield as Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh for farm workers, with no success. For him, labour shortage is not just seasonal. It is a perennial problem. He is willing to import tribal families, promising not just wages but homes and education as well. "It is getting difficult to carry out labour-intensive activities like manual cleaning of produce or making of jaggery and sugar," he says. Local labour has found employment in the burgeoning construction and industrial sectors.
A similar problem obtains in Kerala, where farmers say labourers could not be found for love or money during the coffee and spices harvest season in January and February. 'Labour stress' is generally experienced during rice planting and harvesting and is getting progressively acute. Karnataka faces the same constraints. In parts of Andhra Pradesh, labour shortage is forcing changes in cropping patterns in favour of non-labour intensive crops. Even farmers in Bihar's Darbhanga area complained of labour shortage this year.
Image: Labourers clean wheat at a wholesale grain market. Even at Rs 150 a day, it is difficult to get farm labour
Photographs: Prakash Singh/AFP/Getty Images
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