PESSINA CREMONESE,ITALY — Alongside common local last names like Ferrari and Galli,the telephone directories for the province of Cremona have been registering an increasingly present surname: Singh.
For the past 20 years, Indian immigrants many of whom are Sikhs from Punjab have been settling in Italy’s agricultural heartland to work primarily on farms,often as bergamini,as dairy workers are known in the native dialect.
It has been said that if the Indian workers went on strike, production of Grana Padano, the hard,grainy,spaghetti-topper that this tract of the Po Valley is known for;would shut down. Simone Solfanelli,the president of the Cremona chapter of Coldiretti,Italy’s largest Agricultural Organization said “Well,I don’t know if production would stop, but it would certainly create many difficulties,”.I can tell you that Sikhs are indispensable for farming and for the milk produced in the province — at one million tons per year, about a tenth of all milk produced in Italy".
“Sikhs saved an economy that would have gone to the dogs because young people didn’t want to work with cows,” Mayor Dalido Malaggi of Pessina Cremonese said. He explained "Though the dairy industry is mostly mechanized today, human labor is still necessary 365 days a year.The work is split in two four-hour shifts per day, about 12 hours apart.Young Italians don’t want to work those kinds of hours.They’d prefer to work in factories and want to have evenings and weekends free".Thus,with no substitutes in sight,it was a fortunate match, because many of the Sikh immigrants already knew what it took to keep a farm running.
There are no official statistics of how many Sikhs work in dairy barns here,but Mr. Solfanelli said that out of the 3,000 agricultural laborers in the province, about a one third are Indians
With thanks:The New York Times,Europe.
Dilbag Singh and his wife Sukhwinder Kaur who have been living and working as a bergamino in Cremona,Italy for the last 16 years say that "This is dairy land,and many of us have cows in Punjab..so we are used to the work that we do here.”
Mr.Dilbag Singh during his work shift in the milking room of farm in Cremona, Italy.
Dr.Gurdeep Kaur
University of Milan
ITALY
Associate Professor
SGND Khalsa Collage,
University of Delhi
INDIA
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