COVER STORY/LOCUST
IT’S MAY 27. A few minutes past 11 am. reporters had just arrived in Pachgaon village, Dholpur district, Rajasthan, to enquire about desert locusts that are crossing over to India way ahead of the monsoon rain and invading new areas. As if on cue, a huge swarm, resembling a long rustcoloured low cloud, appeared from nowhere. It quickly swelled forward, taking over the sky and nearly obliterating the desert sun. Bewildered, the residents ran out of their homes and gathered in the open. But before they could get a grasp on the situation, millions of locusts started falling like hail and clung to everything that looked green. Within no minutes, the trees and bushes turned into ragged mounds of glistening brown. Some leaned over to touch the ground—tropical grasshoppers weigh about 2-2.5 gram. A few youngsters took photographs as the others stood motionless.
It was for the first time the residents had seen something like this. Soon the severity of the situation dawned on them. Some residents fetched their utensils and started beating and banging them. Ram Babu, a farm worker in his 60s, rushed to his farm to scare away the pests with a piece of cloth. He repeated the exercise for almost an hour in the 46oC heat. “I saw on the news yesterday about locust attacks in Jaipur, but did not think they would attack our village too,” he said, trying to call the land owner to inform him about the attack.
The nervous clamour of people did not let the swarm stay in the village for more than 40 minutes. But during that short period, Babu lost almost onefourth of his pumpkin crop planted on 3.5 (0.3 ha) land. Peepul, babool and trees looked queer with almost bare branches and punctured leaves.
Only a few insects were fluttering
about when the district agriculture officials arrived at Pachgaon. They have been on alert since the night before and tracking the swarm with the help of their counterparts in other districts and the Locust Warning Organization (LWO)—a unit under the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers' Welfare that runs the world's oldest national locust monitoring system. “At 5:21 am, I got a call from Karauli district that the swarm that settled on the forest for the night had started moving and the wind direction suggested they could enter Dholpur,” says Dayashankar Sharma, deputy director at the district agriculture department. His team of 25 officers soon left for the bordering villages and alerted residents to resort to (sound and smoke). At around 7.15 am, a 10-km long swarm crossed into Dholpur at Jasora village. It was moving at 25-30 km per hour. The officials were on their toes. "They were carrying insecticides but it can be sprayed only when the insects settle at night. So, they joined the residents in stoking up the fire and beating utensils," says Sharma who was waiting at Saipau village road. It was supposed to be the next stopover for the swarm. But because of smoke from nearby brick kilns, it diverted its route and entered Pachgaon.
“The ones left behind would become food for lizards or birds," says Sharma. He was relieved that his team and the others did not let the swarm settle anywhere in the district and could drive it away before sunset. Because that's the time they dread, when locusts are on the move.
This gregarious species usually flies during the day and lands just before sunset. If they settle on a farm, they devour whatever green they spot before flying out in the morning. According the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), which considers desert locusts as the "most dangerous of all migratory pest species" and runs the centralised monitoring and information service, Locust Watch, a swarm of 1 sq km contains
1802-1804: CROPS WERE DESTROYED BY LOCUSTS IN KUTCH, RESULTING IN WIDESPREAD FAMINE. THEY ATTACKED THE REGION AGAIN IN 1834, CAUSING ANOTHER FAMINE
over 40 million locusts that can eat the same amount of food in a day as 35,000 people. Farmers of Sri Ganganagar and Bikaner districts know this voracious nature of the pest only too well. The districts are part of the state's cotton growing belt where agriculture has been made possible because of the Bhakra, Indira Gandhi and Gang canals. In the months of May and June short cotton plants dot the fields in this arid region. But this year most farms wore a desolate look. Mahaveer Saran, who owns 5 ha in Beenjhbaila village, narrates how locusts have pushed his entire village into penury overnight. “A gigantic 40 sq km swarm invaded our village on May 27. Some of my neighbours ran to the market to buy firecrackers as I made calls to the agriculture office and organised people to bang utensils, but to no avail. The officials did not show up. By the time the swarm left around 12 pm the next day, they had eaten every leaf and shoot off our farms,” he says. Earlier that month, on May 10, an equally huge swarm invaded Lalawali village in Bikaner and destroyed all cotton crops in two hours.
Initial estimates by officials with the agriculture department shows locusts have mostly destroyed cotton crops in the state—4,500 ha in Sri Ganganagar, about 9,000 ha in Hanumangarh, 830 ha in Bikaner and 70 ha in Nagaur. On an average, every hectare produces 2,000 kg of cotton, that is sold for `1.20-`1.40 lakh. Farmers say they have never seen such huge swarms and so early in the year.
This trans-border pest usually enters the scheduled desert areas of India from Africa, Gulf and Southwest Asia via Pakistan just ahead of the monsoon season for summer breeding and then returns around October and November towards Iran, Gulf and Africa for spring breeding. But this year, according to the Union agriculture ministry, they were sighted as early as April in the border districts of Rajasthan and Punjab.
Residents of Lalawali say with this