Acute scarcity of labour has posed a serious challenge to crop procurement and is threatening to leave a lasting impact on agriculture as it will delay the harvest of winter-sown crops, particularly wheat, and is delaying the planting of the next crop.

Apart from procurement, planting of cotton and summer ‘moong’ pulses is a challenge for farmers in Madhya Pradesh, UP, Haryana, Punjab and Rajasthan because of concerns of labour shortage as well as availability of fertilizers and seeds.

Labour scarcity is also hurting farms in UP, which is a big supplier of farm hands to Punjab and Haryana. “Apart from threat of getting infected by disese the fear of getting quarantined is playing big on minds of workers who are not willing to move away from their villages,” said Farhan Hamed, labour contractor based in district Bahraich.

Read the full article here (economictimes.indiatimes.com – 09^th April 2020)

Image by Barinder Singh Basan from Pixabay