OOTY: While the unprecedented heavy rains in August wrecked havoc on farm fields, that is keeping the farmers in tears, farmers in the hills are pleading for special monsoon package to compensate the loss of crops and farmers economy due to SW rains in the Nilgiris.
The president of the Hill District Small Farmers Welfare Association, Thumboor I. Bhojan, said that whenever the SW monsoon rains are heavy, the damage done to the vegetable fields are beyond the limit.
In most of the rain-ravaged farm fields, the vegetable crops were ready for harvest. Unfortunately, the rains damaged them, thus making the farmers to incur heavy loss and shed tears over it. For example, in an acre of potato field, the yield generally will be around 10 tonnes.
Since, rains washed away the potato crops, one can imagine the loss to the farmer who took to potato cultivation, he said.
He further added that the government here afterwards should create a corpus fund, meant for crop damage during SW and NE monsoon seasons in the Nilgiris to ensure that the farmers were suitably compensated during the natural catastrophe.
