Читать книгу Sustainable Agriculture Systems and Technologies - Группа авторов - Страница 59

ICAR, which is the apex body of the government of India assessing the impact of the lockdown ensuing from the outbreak of the COVID‐19 on agriculture and its allied sectors, is preparing the roadmap to minimize its demerits to prevent its impact on the food system (Chander 2020; Gupta et al. 2020a,b). While the government has exempted many agricultural operations including harvesting to the movement of produce to the markets according to the directives of the lockdown, ICAR has issued specific advisories to the farmers directing them to take general precautions and safety measures during crop harvesting, post‐harvest operations, seed storage, and their marketing (Khan et al. 2016). However, considering the current situation and spread of the pandemic throughout the country, it is apparent that the farmers have little to hope for. Excluding the farmers of the Bundelkhand region, there can be no better assessment of the adverse impact of the lockdown ensuing from the outbreak of the COVID‐19 than that was observed with other farmers of the country.

The nationwide lockdown has increased the social and economic burden of the farmers in the Bundelkhand region, shattering their hopes and sinking them into the debt trap (APEDA 2019). Subsequently, the farmers of Bundelkhand have employed all their resources to meet the challenges of unpredictable weather. However, these attempts have only been documented through official paperwork (Chaba and Damodara 2020). Due to the absence of any worthy support system, the farmers have put everything at stake to take loans and plan for the next crop season. All efforts to break the longstanding belief that Indian farmers are risk‐averse have been made (Figure 4.5). They have experimented and invested for their betterment.

As per the government's data from Indian solicits, an average of 263 million people are directly engaged in the farming and agriculture sector. Of these, over 55% do not own the croplands (Chakraborty et al. 2017; Chander and Mohan 2020). A prime concern ensuing the announcement of the lockdown by the Prime Minister of India on 24 March 2020, due to the outbreak of COVID‐19, lakhs of people have left the cities on account of unemployment and returned to their villages to avoid the pressures of maintaining a family in cities with a high cost of living. Moreover, they have returned unemployed.