No Helping Hands Here

As farmers from Ajnala in Amritsar, Punjab to Shekpura in Jhajjar, Haryana are busy harvesting their crops; they are missing migrant workers.

- Anilesh S Mahajan

This Rabi season, when the country is under lockdown to check the outbreak of COVID-19 and the labourers from eastern Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, West Bengal, Jharkhand, Odisha who used to travel to Punjab and Haryana to assist farmers in harvesting, clearing straw from grains, loading the grains on tractor trolleys and later when the farmers reached the mandi or market, the migrant labourer with the procurement agencies used to unload these grains and then pack them in the sacks to move them to warehouses of marketing companies.

The season, which starts with the harvest of the Rabi crop and goes till the sowing of the Kharif, both Punjab and Haryana deploys roughly 16 lakh farmhands.