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| Manmohan Singh with
CPM leader Sitaram Yechury at the inauguration of a
housing complex for beedi workers in Sholapur.
(PTI) |
New Delhi, Sept. 1: Four
state-unit presidents and two general secretaries of the
Congress today asked Prime Minister Manmohan Singh what
the government was doing to help distressed and suicide-prone
farmers outside Vidarbha.
He was asked when relief packages
for 30 other districts in Maharashtra, Kerala, Karnataka
and Andhra Pradesh would be announced. The leaders also
wanted to know when details of the Vidarbha bailout would
be spelt out.
Singh told the delegation he was
“on the job” and that the Prime Minister’s
Office (PMO) would get the ministries concerned on board
before going ahead with announcements.
The team comprised Congress general
secretaries Digvijay Singh and Margaret Alva, besides presidents
of the party’s units in Kerala, Karnataka, Maharashtra
and Andhra Pradesh.
They were told that agriculture
minister Sharad Pawar would soon visit Kerala, where farmer
suicides were on the rise. The minister of state in the
PMO, Prithviraj Chauhan, will oversee the implementation
of packages.
According to Digvijay, the meeting
was called to tell the Prime Minister that the Centre’s
promises in Vidarbha and elsewhere must be “reflected
on the ground”. “Everywhere we go, we are asked
what is the PM’s package? The details should be spelt
out,” Alva said.
With the new sowing season close,
farmers direly need seeds, but those in suicide-prone areas
have no money to buy them, Alva said.
The delegation raised crop-loan
problems too, telling the Prime Minister that while interest
was waived in 31 districts, the loans were not rescheduled.
The result was that farmers were declared “defaulters”
and got no further credit. “There should be differential
interest rates for distressed farmers,” said Alva.
The party chief in Andhra, Keshav
Rao, explained how in the past two years, suicide rates
had dropped from 150 per month to five because of easy credit,
subsidy on interest rates and timely availability of fertilisers,
pesticides and seeds.
He said he had taken the issue
of farmers being overcharged for genetically modified cotton
seeds (a key cash crop) to the Monopolies and Restrictive
Trade Practices Commission, which ordered a price cut from
Rs 1100 per kg to Rs 400.
These were the other points raised
at the meeting:
- The Centre had promised one job per family of the farmers
who had killed themselves. The policy was in place in
only five districts of Maharashtra but there was no one
to ensure this was being implemented
- In Karnataka, the BJP-JD (S) government practised “very
careful discrimination” in the areas that picked
Congress legislators. Nothing was done about this
- Two more districts of Kerala, Alleppey and Idduki should
be included in the “suicide-prone” list of Wyanad,
Palakkad and Ottapalam
- In Kerala, the crop insurance scheme should cover spices,
rubber and other cash crops
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