Srinagar: Despite the restrictions amid COVID-19 and the non-availability of laborers, paddy harvesting season in Kashmir is going on full swing with local farmers taking up the challenge and ensuring that their land does not go barren.
Paddy is harvested on approximately 1.40 lakh hectares of land, which constitutes 28 per cent of the total agricultural land in Kashmir. The autumn marks the period of the traditional harvesting in the region.
Usually, the harvesting is heavily dependent on non-local laborers who remained unavailable during this season, the local farmers in Kashmir are finding it difficult to hurry up with the harvest. Abdul Hameed Bhatt, a local farmer in the Burzahama area of Srinagar said, “It was very tough for us to harvest rice in our fields this year because we could not find enough laborer due to COVID.” He is one of the many farmers who took up the challenge of non-availability of sufficient laborers in the right earnest.
