Unlike elsewhere in the country, no farmer here can use things like harvesting machines, unless they have the comrades’ sanction. Each farmer must apply to the local office of the CPM’s Travancore Karshaka Thozhilali Union (TKTU), part of Kerala State Karshaka Thozhilali Union (KSKTU), the party’s farm worker union. The union will then consider the applications on a case-to-case basis, send its own inspection teams to the farms. The comrade-inspectors will determine if enough of their union members are really not available to manually do what farm machines could do a lot cheaper and much more efficiently — at wages fixed by the union. Any farmer who dares to use a farm machine without union sanction has to be ready for the consequences.

“Farm machines are good only for farmers, helping them make big profits,” say C K Bodhanandan, TKTU general secretary. “But they don’t benefit workers. We won’t allow machines to harm workers’ interests,” he told The Indian Express. But even this is a big change — till some three years ago, the CPM and its union had used its might to implement a blanket ban on harvesting machines in this area of over 1 lakh hectares of paddy farms. Some eight years ago, some farmers got together to bring in their first ever farm machinery — basic threshing machines. They had to hastily send them back after the comrades threatened to destroy them.

All this when both rice production and the area under paddy in Kerala has been plummeting over the years. The state depends on its neighbours for about 80 per cent of its requirement. It had 2.76 lakh hectares under paddy last year, against 7.53 lakh hectares in 1961-62, a clear 63 per cent drop. Kerala needs at least 30 tonnes to feed its people, but its rice production was 6.3 lakh tonnes last year, against the 13.39 lakh tonnes in 1981.

Farm labour makes up a bulk of the CPM cadre in the area. Local farmers say even its union’s recently acquired flexibility to consider selective sanction for farm machines had more to do with its own survival. On one side, the strongly unionised workers had been regularly pushing up wages. On the other, too many had given up the work after their kids either migrated and began sending home more money than they would earn on farms, or opted for more lucrative and regular work, like in real estate and road building. Ironically, in this state with a mounting unemployment rate, farmers here seldom get enough workers to reap their crop in time each harvest season, and can’t use machines without the comrades’ nod, either.

Result: Desperate farmers have been trying to shift from unviable and labour intensive paddy to cash crops in many places. Not even the VS Achuthanandan-led campaign a year ago in some parts of the district, in which comrades physically chopped down standing cash crops to force farmers back to farming paddy, has helped.

TKTU chief Bodhanandan says the union has decided on a solution: Make all the farmers sow and reap, taking staggered turns and not at the same time as they have been doing. This is to fit their farming with the availability of union hands to do the farm work. “We are finalising a calendar for farmers here. From next year, they should plant and harvest at the times specified in it for each, so that enough workers are available, so that they need not come to us asking to be allowed to hire machines,” he said.

The sanction, anyway, is not free of cost. Farmers lucky enough to be allowed say the comrades extract a ‘Nokkukooli’ (payment for watching work being done) for every harvesting machine allowed into a farm, though Bodhanandan claims it’s not really a union-authorised levy, and will punish comrades taking it.

Not everyone is amused. “We got many farmers together last year to jointly shift to organic farming. We even helped get them the international quality certification to export their crop as organic food, fetching them much better prices. Between the crops, we also pioneered prawn and grass carp fish farming on their farms to supplement their income. But the party and the union hounded us, attacked us in meetings held in every village. They even broke down many of those temporary fish hatcheries on the farms. It was only after Archbishop Joseph Puwathil called on CPM state secretary Pinarayi Vijayan that they allowed us some amount of peace,” says Father Thomas Peeliyanikkal of the Kuttanad Vikasana Samithy, a prominent church-based farm development body. The ordeal, he says, had begun soon after the Samithy got many harassed farmers together to put up applications to the union at one go, praying that all be allowed to use farm machines. This was after the ripe paddy began deteriorating as not many workers were around to harvest. The crop loss from the delay was considerable, he says.

“The question is, don’t farmers, like everyone else, have their rights? We have even suggested that the union form its own labour collectives of 15 to 20 suitably trained and skilled local workers each, help them own and maintain modern farm machines, so farmers could viably employ them to do all the local farm work. But the union is not interested,” he says. It would usually take 10 or more workers a full day’s effort to harvest paddy in a single acre, which a single harvester machine can do in under an hour. Even the few machines now rented from neighbouring states in cases where the union had allowed them, cost the farmer less than Rs 1500 an hour. Manual labour, besides costing much more even if available, is also inefficient — the machines avert at least 20 per cent of the crop’s harvest losses that manual labour entails.

“We don’t want to consider allowing more machines into farms now. Let the farmers first fit into our annual farming calendar that we will soon give them, so that all available workers remain fully employed,” Bodhanandan says.