BHUBANESWAR: With acute shortage of labourers and machines posing a major obstacle to the harvest of rabi paddy, farmers of the State are in the lurch without any institutional support to protect their crops from the wrath of cyclone Amphan.While neighbouring West Bengal is trying to deal with the manpower shortage by deploying additional combined harvesters, the State Government is yet to initiate any move to bring trained manpower from outside to run harvesting machines.
With the IMD predicting that 12 coastal districts of the State will experience heavy rains under impact of the cyclone, there is hardly any time left for farmers to reap their harvest.What is galling is that the Agriculture department is yet to issue advisory to the farmers for action to be taken to protect their crops. Taking this opportunity, the combined harvester owners have started exploiting farmers.
“The harvester owners are charging `3,600 per hour against normal price of `2,000-`2,200 per hour. We are left with no choice but to pay whatever they demand because of the impending cyclone,” said Basant Barik of Balasore district.
“Apart from the lockdown, we have suffered huge crop loss due to untimely rains, hailstorm and heavy winds in April. I lost hybrid paddy in three acres of land due to hailstorm,” said Samarendra Singh of Gop block in Puri district.Singh is rushing against time to harvest paddy from 10 acre of land which he cultivated as a tenant farmer.
While only 50 per cent of the crops is harvested in Balasore, half of the blocks in Puri are yet to start cutting as their crops are not ripe.Farmers of Balasore mostly depend on labourers from neighbouring Mayurbhanj district while workers from Nayagarh and Kandhamal meet the labour requirement of Puri farmers both in kharif and rabi seasons, Singh said. In the absence of transportation, labourers are unable to move out of their districts, he added.
During a meeting on the State’s preparedness to counter the cyclone on Saturday, Chief Secretary Asit Tripathy informed Union Cabinet Secretary Rajiv Gauba that standing crops particularly, ripe summer paddy, pulses, oil seeds, cashew, mango, coconut and vegetables in lakhs of hectares are likely to be damaged in the heavy rainfall and wind.