Labour for the farm

After land, labour is the next necessary factor for production. Farming requires a great deal of hard work. Small farmers, along with their families, mostly cultivate their own fields. Generally, they provide the labour required for farming themselves. Medium and large farmers hire farm labourers to work on their fields.

Farm labourers come either from landless families or families cultivating small plots of land. Unlike farmers working on their own fields, farm labourers do not have a right over the crops grown on the land. Instead they are paid wages by the farmer for whom they work. They have been employed to do the work.

Wages can be in cash or in kind (crop). Sometimes labourers get meals too. Wages vary widely from region to region, from crop to crop, from one farm activity to another (like sowing and harvesting). There is also a wide variation in the duration of employment. A farm labourer might be employed on a daily basis or on contract for one particular farm activity like harvesting or for the whole year.

Shivaiah is a landless farm labourer who works on daily wages in Rampur. This means that he must regularly look for work. Shivaiah’s wages are less than what the Uttar Pradesh government has set as minimum wages for labourers. There is heavy competition for work among the farm labourers in Rampur, so people agree to work for lower wages. With large farm- ers increasingly relying on machines like tractors, threshers, harvesters, the num- ber of days of work available to a worker is very low in rural areas. In the whole of last year, Shivaiah got less than five months of work on the farm. During the periods when no work is available, Shivaiah and many like him have applied to village Panchayat for work under MGNREGA.

Why are farm labourers like Shivaiah poor?

What do the large and medium farmers in Rampur do to get labour for their farms? Compare this with your region.