India’s mid-March Covid-19 lockdown – announced at very short notice at night – led to panic and confusion all over the country. While the plight of hundreds of thousands of migrant workers rushing from the cities made international headlines, the rural areas they were mostly returning to received little attention. In Assam crops were wilting due to disrupted water provision and elsewhere farmers were stranded with bumper harvests. On 18 April, a farmer in Karnataka tweeted a short video asking for help to sell his nearly 100 tonnes of harvest-ready cabbages at a throwaway price. He was not alone; several others faced the prospect of rotting crops, with no farm labour to harvest them and transport to markets uncertain.
The lockdown triggered a labour shortage in agrarian states, which often depend on migrant workers from neighbouring states to bring in harvests. These farm labourers were among the vast numbers of migrant workers stranded all over the country, desperately trying to get back home. Towards the end of April, the government announced special buses to return them to their villages. And on 1 May, special migrant labourer trains were also announced to transport stranded workers home. In the long run, once returned to the communities they had left in order to find work, they will face an inevitable resource crunch.
