Low cost manual labor ? Gotta be kidding. I live in Goa and need labor occasionally for specific tasks. So I go to the decrepit and defunct Bazaar area in Porvorim where the migrant labor congregate to offer their services. Going rate right now ? Rs. 300 per day (it was Rs 250 last year, and who knows how much it will be next year !). Try to hire one, and they (probably looking out for each other) demand that you hire two or they wont come. They will "work" from 8:30 to 5:30 with a 2-hour mid-day lunch/siesta break. At 5:00 p.m. they start washing up and dressing in preparation to go home. You have to provide transportation from the Bazaar to your home and back. Then they tell you what work they will do and what they will NOT do. You have to closely supervise them, or very little gets done. I caught some of them taking long breaks to ingest some type of stimulant, I think it was tobacco and limestone powder. You ask them where they come from, and they say Bihar, Jharkhand, Chattisgarh, Orrisa and sometimes Karnataka. So even the origin of the migrant workers has changed. It used to be that what we sometimes called "Ghatis" came from over the Ghats in neighboring Maharashtra or Karnataka. Word has spread afar that Goa is the land of milk and honey. Re Field (Agricultural) work. They have no idea about the type of Agricultural work we do in Goa. They can dig a ditch, move a pile of stones from here to there, carry a few bags of cement or "chirre" (cut stones), clear brush etc. Has to be relatively simple stuff. So who is going to till the fields ?? My fellow villagers tell me that the only reliable workers they occasionally get are mostly from Maharashtra who time their arrival in Goa at the time of harvesting the rice. They specialize in scything the rice stalks and foot stomping/thrashing the rice stalks to separate the grain from the stalk. Its a sellers market. They survey the size of the field to be harvested and quote a price. Take it or leave it. They are in demand, and no haggling over the price. Take it or let your grain rot ! At least these workers come to Goa for a specific task and return to their home villages in Maharashtra when the work is done, unlike the workers from the faraway states who build shacks on anybody's vacant land and live with their families, procreating, children running about naked, and defecating anywhere. Another neighbor needed workers to clear her Cashew plantation. The hills where the cashews are grown are choked with weeds and thorny brush after the monsoons. The cashew plantations have to be cleared of the brush and weeds so that the cashews can be collected. Hardly any laborers are willing to undertake the onerous task. I can foresee a time when cashews cannot be collected and our beloved Feni will be scarcer than it is right now. These are the personal observations of a "Bhatcar" in Goa.