A good wheat crop in Punjab has been overshadowed by a scarcity the state has not seen before. For long, migrant labourers from Uttar Pradesh and Bihar have played a vital but unacknowledged role in the state’s agrarian success. But the numbers of farmhands trooping into the state is declining sharply. A recent report co-authored by Professor M.S. Sidhu of Punjab Agricultural University, Ludhiana, suggests that the number of migrant labourers in Punjab could plummet by as much as 40 per cent. In other words, if in 2006, 4.21 lakh labourers came from Bihar and UP to work in Punjab, this year the number of migrants reaching the state in search of work could reduce to 2.5 lakh. Professor Sidhu’s study is in touch with ground reality. Jaswinder Sangha, a potato farmer based in Jalandhar, is planning to invest in a grading machine from Netherlands as he doesn’t have enough people to harvest, sort and pack his crop. The machine will cost him Rs16 lakh. Till last year, Sangha, who is one of Punjab’s “many prosperous farmers”, would pay Rs 7-10 per packet to every labourer. He now urges the government to subsidise farmers like him for problems caused by this paucity. The shortage, however, is likely to become more conspicuous when the kharif or the sowing season—postponed to June 15 through a government ordinance to conserve ground water—gets rolling. Usually, the sowing gets over by July 1 but short of hands, farmers will find it impossible to meet the deadline this year. In Khanna mandi, Asia’s largest grain market, procurement operations threaten to grind to a halt as there aren’t enough people to pack, carry and load the grain on to the lorries. H.S. Rosha, chairman, market committee, says a significant portion of the bumper crop could rot due to inordinate delays in loading. He admits having never faced such shortage in 40 years of his business. Professor Sidhu attributes it to factors like the implementation of the National Rural Employment Guarantee scheme and the increase in infrastructure building and construction activity in other parts of India. The assured wage of Rs 100 a day that NREG ensures is higher than what the Punjabi farmer pays (Rs 70-80). More importantly, a labourer earns more by not leaving his home. Even when he does, he opts to move towards construction activity in southern India because wages in the real estate sector are higher. There are social reasons too. As finance minister Manpreet Badal says, “For a long time, the prosperous Punjabi farmer took these people for a ride.” As Rosha points out, the state’s agriculturists never gave migrant labour its due. This year, the MSP for wheat went up from Rs 850 to Rs 1,000 per quintal. But the wages for loading and packing were reduced from 80 paise per sack to 40 paise per sack.
