SHILLONG: The farming community and road-side vendors are in dire straights ever since the global pandemic broke out nearly six months ago. A visit to the Shillong Peak (Lum Shyllong) another dead tourist spot, would reveal how the pandemic has hit the local community.
About 20 vegetable stalls on the right side of the road while travelling up to Lum Shillong are all shut down. They look as forlorn and as miserable as their owners must be in these trying times.
The lone tea shop that was open did almost no business other than selling tea and snacks to some labourers who were repairing the road leading towards the Air Force Station at Laitkor Peak.
Speaking to this correspondent, the shop owner said that without the day tourists who used to come from Assam and a few local tourists who have now stopped coming, they have no one to sell their agricultural products to. On the Pomlakrai side are endless agricultural plots growing cauliflower, cabbage and radish.
A local farmer and his associates who were seen washing radish and tying them up in bundles said “We are sending all these bunches of radish properly stacked outside the state. We will be taking them to a certain point in Iewduh from where the transporters would take them to Assam and beyond. Before the pandemic the transporters were coming right to the farm gate to buy the fresh vegetables and taking them outside the state but now with restricted entry those transporters are no longer coming here,” he said.
Whether the Government and its cooperatives are even aware about the plight of this section of growers who are also sellers of their products is doubtful. When asked how they are surviving during these difficult times, the farmers said, “Without any visitors here in the past six months we have ended up growing and selling our products to each other. What else do we do?”
While the sordid saga of economic impact of COVID continues to take a toll on the farmers and vegetable vendors, there has no immediate hope of return of normalcy in Iewduh or official stranglehold over travel restrictions. With nobody to take care of us, we the farmers are hoping for divine intervention”, said a hapless farmer looking heaven wards.
