Labour Shortage and Unexpected Wheat Arrival Causes Procurement Delays in India

The procurement agencies officials said there was an insufficiency of labour for the loading and unloading of wheat bags in the trucks to ferry the inventory to the godowns.

Besides, the officials maintained that the unexpected arrival of the wheat stock from April 10 in the markets had left procurement agencies with little time to prepare for the loading and unloading of the stock in the godowns of the Food Corporation of India (FCI).

Labour insufficiency adds to the distress

• The officials said there was a paucity of labour for loading and unloading wheat bags in trucks to ferry the stocks to godowns

• From April 10, there was an unexpected arrival of wheat stocks in the markets. This had given procurement agencies little time to make preparations for the loading and unloading of stocks.

• Till Wednesday, as much as 24.47 lakh quintals had been procured. Out of this, only 7.35 lakh quintals were lifted.

• A total of 17.12 lakh quintals of purchased wheat was lying in markets besides the unsold stock which is piling up every day.

The food and supplies official maintained that at present, labour was still engaged in agriculture works on the farms. He said, “The same people work as labour in the process of loading and unloading the stocks. So, the process is slow to the extent that a loaded truck has to wait for about more than an hour at the FCI godown for its turn.”

Apart from this, the official added that because of the rain that occurred on March 31 and April 1, the procurement could start by April 10. “We could get little time for making arrangements for logistics and storage as the wheat began arriving suddenly and in bulk in the markets after April 10. The arrival started by April 1 or the next couple of days, the arrival would have been slow and we could match up with the arrival and lifting”, he said, adding that the unexpected rise in temperature had reduced the harvesting period by about a week this time.

Meanwhile, Sirsa DC Parth Gupta issued instructions to the procurement agencies to step up the lifting procedure by engaging more labor and trucks so that the clogging in the markets could ease up.