Gujarat: Migrant influx salvaged Sabarkantha farmers' crop, thanks to cops

Vadodara: When migrants from Gujarat were heading back to their natives in hordes last month, Sabarkantha district was witnessing a reverse trend.

The district saw an influx of labourers from tribal-dominated Dahod, Mahisagar, Panchmahal and Chhota Udepur, who actually helped many local farmers salvage their standing crop by working as farm labourers.

At a time when farmers in Saurashtra and other parts of Gujarat were staring at massive crop loss due to exodus of farm labourers, their counterparts in Sabarkantha were lucky to have their potatoes, wheat, groundnut, bajri, harvested in the nick of time.

Fearing huge losses, the local farmers’ body approached the district police officials to facilitate entry of farm labourers. The inter-district movement was banned due to lockdown then.

“Besides the requests of farmers’ bodies, there was chatter on the WhatsApp group of sarpanchs to bring farm labourers for harvest,” said Sabarkantha superintendent of police,Chaitanya Mandlik.

Police then coordinated with the administrations of these four districts to bring the farm labourers. “We helped them in getting passes while their transport was managed by farmers. This was necessary as farmers would have faced big losses,” Mandlik said.

In fact, it was a win-win situation for all as the labourers were anyway out of work in their native places due to lockdown. After a month when the harvesting was over, the local again coordinated to send the farm labourers back to their native districts.

“Some two dozen labourers came to my farm and I could harvest groundnut and bajra. I paid for their transport. This time they did not get their children along as they feared getting infected with coronavirus,” said Rasik Patel, a farmer from Vadrad village of Prantij taluka.

Kalpesh Patel, chairman of Talod APMC and a farmer in Harsol village, added, "When the labourers were being sent back after harvest as well as when they in our farms, we ensured that their proper screening was done and they had masks.”

Earlier too, when the migrants had started the arduous march on foot for their natives in Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh, Sabarkantha police had come to their rescue by taking them to shelter homes and other government buildings in order to avoid chaos at the Gujarat-Rajasthan border. Every police station was asked to run community kitchens to feed two meals to the migrants. Mandlik said that the department provided food to at least 25,000 people.