Punjab's agriculture and industry run substantially on migrant labour from Bihar, eastern Uttar Pradesh, Jharkhand and Odisha. The transplanting of paddy in June and July is done overwhelmingly by migrant workers.
Estimates of the seasonal inflow run into the hundreds of thousands and the resident migrant population of Ludhiana alone is in the lakhs.
They are called bhaiye, which is not a neutral word in Punjabi usage. Their housing, wages and access to services are poor and their political representation is near zero, since most are not registered to vote in Punjab.
The mechanisation of paddy transplanting has been slow because migrant labour has been cheap. When it stopped during the 2020 lockdown, Punjab's sowing was thrown into crisis and the state discovered publicly how dependent it was.
A state whose own population has emigrated for a century in search of work is sustained by people who have come to it for the same reason, and the two facts are rarely put in the same sentence in Punjab.
The wheat and paddy harvests are cut and transplanted by labour from Bihar, Uttar Pradesh and Jharkhand, moving on a seasonal schedule that has run for decades.
Paddy transplanting is the labour bottleneck. It has to be done in a narrow window and it is back work in standing water, and Punjabi labour largely stopped doing it a generation ago.
The wage is negotiated collectively at village level each season and the negotiation is often tense. Direct seeded rice, which would remove the transplanting entirely, has not been adopted at scale.