Why farmers can get no labour http://specials.rediff.com/news/2008/may/29sld01.htm
-------------------------------------------- The co-existence of labour shortage and unemployment has long confounded economists. Currently, it is confounding Indian farmers. Not just in Punjab and Haryana or 'forward' south India, but over large swathes of Uttar Pradesh, Uttarkhand, Rajasthan and Bihar. Contrary to conventional perception, it's not just skill-oriented sectors like IT or business or the construction sector (which demands semi-skilled workers) that are affected by the global labour crunch. Agriculture is hard hit and again, it is not just the big farmers who are affected. Smallholders and middle-level farmers are also concerned. Some farmers describe shortage of local labour during harvest and sowing as their most serious problem. Others say it ranks just after water as a farming constraint and could well impact agriculture by forcing changes in cropping patterns, catalyzing across the board increases in the price of agricultural commodities and encouraging absentee landlordism. In Punjab and Haryana, the problem acquired urgency this year when the traditional train-loads of labour from Bihar failed to show up, delaying wheat harvesting and hay-making. Labour is always tight during the rabi harvest, but this year, the shortage was unprecedented. Given Punjab's high rate of urbanisation and seasonal demand for labour, farm wages have attracted workers from Bihar and Jharkhand for decades. Some are attached labourers or permanent employees but most are circular migrants. This year, the latter preferred to stay home or go elsewhere -- despite a 75 per cent increase in wages over last year! In Rajasthan, labour ranks with water on the list of must-haves. Farmer Man Singh of Jaipur had to hire buses to pick up his agricultural labourers from Kishangarh in Ajmer during the kharif harvest season last year and have them dropped back to their homes. "Every year, it becomes harder to find farm labourers," he says. In Mandana village of Kota, farmers say they cannot hire labour even at Rs 150 per day. In Rudrapur, farmer Bhupinder Singh Johal is looking as far afield as Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh and Chhattisgarh for farm workers, with no success. For him, labour shortage is not just seasonal. It is a perennial problem. He is willing to import tribal families, promising not just wages but homes and education as well. "It is getting difficult to carry out labour-intensive activities like manual cleaning of produce or making of jaggery and sugar," he says. Local labour has found employment in the burgeoning construction and industrial sectors. A similar problem obtains in Kerala, where farmers say labourers could not be found for love or money during the coffee and spices harvest season in January and February. 'Labour stress' is generally experienced during rice planting and harvesting and is getting progressively acute. Karnataka faces the same constraints. In parts of Andhra Pradesh, labour shortage is forcing changes in cropping patterns in favour of non-labour intensive crops. Even farmers in Bihar's Darbhanga area complained of labour shortage this year. Labour economists -- who entirely failed to predict the labour scarcity that slowed down manufacturing in 'labour surplus' China -- are silent on the issue. Some pundits say the National Rural Employment Guarantee Act scheme is responsible for curbing not only out-migration of labour, but also removing labour from local agricultural operations. As a result of the NREGA, the landless or marginal households in rural areas that traditionally sold their labour, now have a steady revenue stream at their doorstep which precludes the need to find work elsewhere. If so, it is a credit to the implementation of the NREGA, regardless of audits conducted by sociologists who found substantial 'leakages' in the funds set aside for the employment guarantee scheme. It is true that the NREGA has raised the bar as far as daily wages go. The implementation of the scheme may well require some refining like adhering to the 100-day employment limit and suspending NREGA during harvest and sowing seasons. But the shortage of labour predates the implementation of the NREGA scheme. Labour bottlenecks are regional and seasonal in nature, but there is little doubt that sociological factors are playing as important a role as economic ones. The work ethic in rural areas has changed. For many traditional farmers, agriculture is not seen as either economically or socially rewarding. Getting a salaried job is a sign of upward mobility, whereas tending cattle is about as low as you can get on the social scale. Agriculture is a good profession only if you are a farm manager, Punjab-style, rather than a farmer and is just about acceptable if you are a salaried employee. Farmers of Kadera village in Jaipur district summed up the problem, "If a boy is a farmer, it is difficult to marry him off. The girl's family would want somebody who earns a salary". The contribution of families to farm activity can no longer be taken for granted and thus, the farmers are now putting an economic cost to labour. "There was a time when family members would look after the cattle themselves. It was a labour of love. Now, only the old people do it, as the young in the village refuse to have anything to do with the cowshed. I have to hire labourers to look after the cattle and that with great difficulty. One man's wages alone cost me Rs 20,000 a year, plus food. So keeping cattle is becoming uneconomic," explains Man Singh. Labourers are willing to drive tractors, but not to plough the field with a pair of oxen, he adds. The Kadera farmers say the constraint is not merely social contempt for manual labour, but that the youth are unwilling to take on hard physical effort. They look for other avenues for income generation. The aversion to manual labour is particularly pronounced among the educated. Unemployment rate among rural males is a mere 2 per cent overall but among the educated, it is 16 per cent. In Anwa village in Tonk district, farmers explain that the landless labourers prefer to go to the city to earn wages rather than work in the fields. This is not surprising, as the wage rates for both regular and casual workers are much higher in urban than in rural areas. However, there is a social component. Sending remittances back home enhances social status. Thus, labourers are willing to work in the fields in other districts, but not in their own village. The boom in the construction industry -- which employs 3.3 crore workers, drawn mostly from the agricultural sector -- has attracted rural labour, as these projects provide a longer term of employment that agriculture. Farmers in highly mechanised states like Punjab need labour for barely 50 days of the year. Prospects of long term employment are naturally more attractive. Reliable estimates say infrastructure projects will generate 92 million man years of employment in the next six years! When smallholders migrate to cities along with the landless labourers, this creates a problem for the women, who are left in charge of the landholdings. They cannot manage on their own and have to hire labour in turn. The lateral shift of labour from the farm sector may force a shift towards non-labour intensive agricultural crops among farmers who cannot afford mechanisation or increased labour costs. It will also spur innovations in labour saving technologies. However, current trends show that in a tight labour environment, low maintenance orchards are preferred to cereals or pulses. A lot of farmers may simply sell their holdings to urban dwellers, who would also prefer low maintenance operations. This will impact on India?s already precarious foodgrains scenario. Attracting workers to agriculture would require social and economic incentives. Of course, increase in farm wages and regular employment is positive from a poverty reduction point of view. Also, it will curb migration. The flip side is that food prices are likely to go up as farmers factor in the increased cost of labour.
