Responding to the state’s Food department’s contingency plea, 220 rice mills across Burdwan (East) finally resumed work. The district administration, to help bring back confidence about a healthy and sanitised working atmosphere, ordered health screening of the all mill workers today.

Out of 533 total mills in Burdwan (East), state’s rice bowl, 170 were operating till the the nationwide lockdown was declared by the Prime Minister. But the state Food and Supply department required resuming work at the mills in an apprehension that the depleting food grain stock at the warehouses might hit the Public Distribution System if the lockdown were to be extended.

In the last week of March, Food department had asked the district authorities of Burdwan (East), Hooghly, Bankura, Birbhum and Nadia to expedite arrangements to get the mills rolling. The mill owners were facing severe constraints. The mill workers from remote districts like Bankura, Purulia and 24 Parganas (South) vacated the premises and were reluctant to return out of COVID-19 panic.

The farmers were not willing to sell paddy, hording stocks expecting better price at crisis hours in future, and the downstream industry of mills like the rice-bran units were not operating, causing inconvenience in mill operation as bran stocks would pile up increasingly.

After a series of meeting with the district administration and police, the mills agreed to resume work as the state came forward to help in travelling of the migrated workers back to the mills.

“Currently, we are operating 220 mills at an average of 40 per cent capacity and for that, nearly 10,000 labourers have been shifted to our premises,” said Subrata Mondal, secretary of Bengal Rice Mills Association in Burdwan.

“Nearly 25,000 workers are required for optimal capacity operation of the mills,” He added. He noted that the district administration, as it had promised earlier, has come forward to help by providing masks and sanitizers to the workers to every mill. Vijay Bharti, DM, Burdwan (East), ordered the BDOs in the respective blocks to supervise sanitization work at the mills personally.

He said, “We have provided 10,000 masks and 500 litres of sanitizers to the mills as of now.”