As summer approaches in Jharkhand, mahua flowers begin blossoming by the end of March. The warm and dry conditions are ideal for harvesting the mahua flowers as they fall to the ground. But rainfall and hailstorms in late March and early April have disrupted this delicate process.
“This time due to the rains, many flowers started rotting when they were laid out to dry,” said Kuldeep Minj, a farmer from Jharkhand’s Latehar district.
Traditionally, mahua flowers are not plucked from trees but gathered from the ground and then dried under sunlight for up to three days to be properly preserved. “If the flowers don’t dry properly they start to get sticky and rot,” said Minj, who usually harvests flowers from trees on his land and a nearby forest.
Up north in Punjab, farmers were expecting a rich yield from wheat. “The quality of the crop this year was excellent,” said Jagmeet Singh, a farmer from Kotli village of Punjab’s Sri Muktsar Sahib district. “Otherwise, we usually had to spray insecticides worth Rs 1,000-1,500 per acre.”
That was until April 4.
Two weeks before Singh was to harvest his crop, a sudden hailstorm dashed all his hopes. “The hailstorm lasted for only 35-40 minutes but damaged almost 80% of the crop,”...
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