Farm labourers at work. Telegraph picture

Bhubaneswar, June 27: Radha Kanta Samal, a marginal farmer from Kansara in Kendrapara district, has stopped cultivating the kharif crop on his own. He has handed over his 1.5 acres to a sharecropper who has promised him 25 per cent of the yield.

Samal’s decision has been dictated by the spiralling labour cost and an acute shortage of farmhands. “Things are going beyond our control. The labour cost has almost doubled,” said the farmer blaming it on the Rs 2-a-kg rice scheme of the state government and the Centre-sponsored National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme (NREGS).

The crisis is universal and the farm labour cost has skyrocketed to a prohibitive Rs 180 to Rs 200 a day, a jump of more than 100 per cent, in districts like Kendrapara.

“With such high labour costs, paddy cultivation has become highly risky. Sharecropping is a much better option though the returns are low,” Adikanda Sahu, a farmer from Dutialo in Kendrapara where paddy is cultivated across 1.69 lakh hectares of land. On paper, the district accounts for 1.32 lakh agriculture labourers but the bulk of this force is not turning up for work anymore.

Ironical as it may sound, both these poverty alleviation schemes have become a disincentive for work in agricultural fields. With rice heavily subsidised, even the poorest of the poor appear to be in a position to buy their monthly quota of 25kg and rest at home instead of going to work. “Besides, work in the farmland requires some expertise which is not the case with NREGS work. Hence, bulk of the labour force chooses to skip farm work,” said Biraja Prasad Pati, a civil society activist.

Sources said the cost of paddy cultivation per acre has exceeded Rs 12,000 with more than half of it being spent on labour. In comparison, the returns are meagre with farmers struggling to manage even Rs 14,000 an acre. “We have received reports of increase in the farm labour cost,” said Kendrapara district labour officer Pradeep Kumar Mohanty.

Significantly, while the government set a minimum wage in the state of Rs 90 for unskilled labourers, workers engaged in NREGS projects get Rs 125 for a day’s work. Even for those on the NREGS rolls, working in the agricultural fields can be a more lucrative option, but the latter is hard and skilled work. So, most of the labourers either skip it or demand wages which would be beyond the means of small and marginal farmers.

Besides, they have another easy and eminently lucrative option of working on construction sites where daily wage rates vary between Rs 230 to Rs 250 a day across the state. In fact, there are allegations that in certain parts of coastal Orissa, NREGS is being done with the help of machines with the active collusion of the executing authorities and the cardholder beneficiaries.

“The beneficiaries get a part of their wage sitting at home. This supplements their income from other sources,” said a field-level functionary on the condition of anonymity.

The farm labour crisis is just as acute in the Kalahandi-Bolangir-Koraput (KBK) belt with farmers blaming it primarily on the government’s subsidised rice scheme. “This has completely destroyed the work culture. The agrarian labour force is getting increasingly fragmented and distracted. With rice, their staple food, available so cheap, they are just not willing to work,” said Saytanarayan Mishra, a leading mango grower of Sonepur.

Balasore farmer Pradeep Das admitted that spiralling labour costs have made paddy cultivation difficult. “The labourers not only demand very high wages but are also irregular at work. We have been trying to manage with labour from Bengal’s Midnapore,” said Das. His feelings were mirrored by Kulamani Mishra, a government officer, who said that even NREGS work was suffering as bulk of the labour force was being drawn by stone quarries where the wages were as high as Rs 250 to Rs 300 a day.

Fed up with the growing demands of farm labourers, G. Jagamma of Narayanpur in Ganjam district has decided to reply on her own resources. “Since they are not willing to work for Rs 70 a day, which is the maximum I can pay them, our extended family including relatives have formed a group to work in turns on our fields. We have been doing everything from ploughing to harvesting,” said Jagamma.

May be, there lies the answer to the worst-ever labour crisis plaguing the state’s agriculture sector.

(with inputs from Sunil Patnaik, Manoj Kar, Sudeep Guru and Sibdas Kundu)