Bathinda, Feb. 28 -- As the cotton sowing season begins in April, apprehension grips Punjab's cotton belt with farmers and experts wary of reviving the traditional kharif crop due to pest-prone hybrid seeds and an acute shortage of farm labour.

For this year, the state agriculture department has set a target to cover 1.5 lakh hectares, which would be about 30,000 hectares more than the kharif sowing season of 2024-25. In 2021, cotton was sown on 2.5 lakh hectares in Punjab.

Women are the main workforce traditionally engaged in picking cotton balls in the semi-arid southern districts of Punjab.

Experts and farmers say cotton acreage in Punjab has steadily declined since 2021-22. Due to the sharp decline in work in cotton fields, farmwor...