The last week’s rainfall has given a boost-up to agricultural operations in Kendrapada district, but the farmers are a worried lot as swarming caterpillars are now damaging their crops.

Thousands of hectares of paddy crop have been damaged following the pest attack. No help from the district administration has yet reached to the affected farmers.

Even a tenant of the district on Thursday committed suicide after losing his mental balance. He had cultivated land after taking loan from a local co-operative society and borrowing money from locals, alleged Krushak Bikas Samabaya Samiti president Pramod Kumar Sahu.

The farmers who are not able to use the costly pesticides to fight the menace of insects, locally known as ‘leda poka’, now expect only less than one-eighth of their usual harvest.

According to Deputy Director of Agriculture (DDA) Prafulla Chandra Mishra, as many as 4,358 hectares of paddy crop have been damaged due to leda poka attack. The Agriculture Department has already provided 9,380 liters of insecticides to overcome the problem in all the nine blocks of the district at subsidised rate.

A handful of rich farmers in some areas tried to prevent the onslaught by spraying costly insecticides, but the pests, fleeing from the insecticides, merely took up position in the neighbouring fields, the owners of which could not afford to buy the costly chemicals. But due to lack of proper distribution of pesticides and insecticides at the block levels, the farmers were compelled to purchase the pesticides from black market.

While the subsidised rate of pesticide is between Rs 110 and Rs120, but in black market its rate is more than Rs 300. As a result, the farmers were compelled to purchase the pesticides at higher rate from the black market, said District Krushak Sabha secretary Gayadhar Dhal.

As per official reports, in the khaiff paddy season, about 1, 23,770 hectares of land has been cultivated in the district.