Jammu, May 02 :Farmers in Jammu division are worried about the shortage of labourers, required for harvesting of wheat crop, due to COVID-19 lockdown.Farmers from RS Pora area of Jammu division said that even though a record crop is expected this year but lockdown is taking a heavy toll on them as there is shortage of labourers.
“There are no migrant labourers to help with harvesting and procurement and no transport facilities to take the produce to markets in the area,” they said.They said that the crop is ready and ripe but shortage of labourers and besides that machines are not available due to which farmers are facing difficulties in harvesting the crop.
“We have permission to harvest during the lockdown, but there’s no labour available. So my entire family has been manually harvesting the crop for the last two days,” said Vikas a farmer from RS Pora.He said that so far they have been able to harvest less than half the field as it is a time-consuming process and needs more people to harvest it.
“After harvesting we will have to get the threshing done. It will take at least another week to complete the harvest,” he said.Crop is ready and its procurement time has already begun but all the labourers have returned back and if the crisis doesn’t end soon, the crop will go waste,” said another farmer.He said that for procurement process labour is needed at the local market for unloading, cleaning, packing into gunny bags, storage and loading into trucks for transport to FCI go-downs.”We used to directly take our produce to mandis but mandis are closed and we have to store our produce at our homes now and for that we don’t have stores,” he said.
Farmers urged the authorities to provide them machines for harvesting purpose because if the weather changes, the crops will get severely damaged by the rains
