As work on the National Rural Employment Guarantee Programme gathers pace in the villages of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh, paddy farmers of Punjab are faced with an unprecedented shortage of farm hands to sow the crop.
Rough estimates suggest that almost 40 per cent of the 200,000-odd workers who travel around this time every year from poor villages in Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to Punjab to help sow the crop haven't turned up this season.
Last year, Punjab had produced 10.1 million tonnes of rice, which was 11 per cent of the national production. The state contributes a third to the central rice granary. Paddy is sown on 2.6 million hectares of farmland in the state.
Visits to villages showed that many small farmers have had to postpone paddy sowing this season. Waterlogged fields waiting for people to come and plant the saplings are a common sight. Longer delays, warned agricultural experts, could lower the yield of the crop upon maturity.
Those who have decided not to wait and go ahead with the sowing have had to pay significant premiums for workers this season.
Farmers in the Ropar district said labour cost had shot up from Rs 500-600 per acre last year to Rs 800-900 now, a rise of over 50 per cent. In Fatehgarh Sahib, costs were found to be as high as Rs 1,000 per acre.
This, the farmers complained, had come on top of the steep rise in diesel prices, shortage of urea and the increase in seed prices.
"The water table also has fallen at least five feet. All my inputs have become more expensive," said Marah Singh of village Choranwala in Fatehgarh Sahib.
What has made matters worse is the state government's directive to farmers not to begin sowing paddy before June 10, so that farmers use rain water and don't draw on ground water. While sowing used to be staggered over several weeks earlier, this has caused it to be bunched together and worsened the labour shortage.
Farming in Punjab is highly mechanised, but only when it comes to field preparation and crop harvest. Paddy is always sown manually. The machines that can sow the paddy saplings are expensive (Rs 7 lakh and above) and the small farm sizes put their commercial viability in question, farmers said.
Mahesh Yadav, a worker from Bihar who currently works in Punjab farms, said: "This is the last time that I am visiting Punjab, as there is no dearth of opportunities in our state also due to the boom in the construction sector."
Clearly, the work on wells, roads and check dams in the villages of Bihar and east Uttar Pradesh is not good news for Punjab farmers.