During the current Boro season, the administration has taken an extraordinary initiative to tackle the crisis of paddy workers in the haor area. Workers interested in harvesting paddy can harvest paddy in Haor area with the permission of local UP chairman and Upazila Nirbahi Officer.
For this, the government will provide extra cash 200 or 5kg rice and transport facilities will be provided to all the workers who come to haor to maintain safe distance. After the workers move to different upazilas of Haor, the Upazila administration and health department will arrange to keep them in different schools and corona virus test will be carried out. If corona tests of the farmers are found positive, they will be kept in the institutional quarantine and the rest will be allowed to work.
Already, 450 interested workers from different areas of Chattogram have been sent to Austragram for harvesting. Chattogram Metropolitan Deputy Police Commissioner Mehdi Hasan confirmed the matter. Also, workers from Sirajganj, Sherpur, Jamalpur and Mymensingh have already started coming to different upazilas.
This year, 1 lakh 57 thousand 800 hectares of land was set as the target of boro cultivation in the district. But at the beginning of the season, due to the cold weather in the winter and dense fog, 1 lakh 3 thousand 248 hectares of land was set as the target of cultivation for the production of 6 lakh 67 thousand metric tonnes of rice.
Meanwhile, as the seasonal storms and hailstones have started, farmers have been worried about whether they can harvest paddy. Farmers are now very much anxious for fear of early floods.
Deputy Director of the Agriculture Extension Department, Md. Shamsul Alam, said that this year, the government has provided 180 combined harvester and 137 reaper machines for the six districts. In addition, there are already 326 combined harvester and 56 reaper machines. As a result, it will not be possible to harvest paddy in a wide range of haor areas with a small number of instruments.
Meanwhile, Chattogram Metropolitan Police (CMP) has arranged safe transport facilities for farm labourers who were sent from the port city to Kishoreganj to work on paddy fields to harvest Boro crops in a bid to ease the crisis of labourers amid the nationwide shutdown.
In the first phase, police sent 100 workers on Sunday evening to Kishoreganj's Austagram upazila from the port city's Bakalia on five buses, ensuring social distancing measures and security. Fourteen hundred more workers will be sent to the area on buses in the next three days, said police sources.
