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Implement farmers’ panel report: BJP

Rajnath Singh

BANGALORE: Expressing concern over the massive number of farmers’ suicides in the country, the BJP on Sunday urged Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to immediately implement the National Farmers’ Commission report to bail out farmers from the crisis and also demanded that an emergency Parliament session be convened to discuss farmers’ problems.

Addressing a press conference in Bangalore, BJP president Rajnath Singh pointed out that more than 17,000 farmers committed suicide in the country in 2006, according to statistics available with the National Crime Records Bureau.

In other words, every 30 minutes one farmer was committing suicide in the country, he said. This had clearly shown that all the farmers’ packages announced by the Prime Minister, including the much-hyped Vidharbha package, had failed, Mr. Singh argued.

He wondered why the Prime Minister was sitting on the report of the National Farmers’ Commission headed by renowned agricultural scientist M. S. Swaminathan.

Demanding that an emergency session of Parliament be convened to discuss the agrarian crisis, he also sought a one-time waiver of farmers’ loans besides reducing the interest on farm loans to 4 per cent.

Mr. Singh said that the country’s foodgrain storage which was around 20 lakh tonnes when the NDA government stepped down in 2004 had now decreased to a mere two lakh tonnes under the UPA regime.

He accused the UPA government of “ignoring” the interests of the country’s farmers. The UPA government, which was importing wheat, was paying higher prices to foreign farmers than that paid to our farmers though the wheat produced by the foreign farmers was of substandard quality, he alleged.

The BJP leader alleged that that the UPA government had totally failed to check the rise in prices of essential commodities and handling of internal security. The UPA government was “directionless and spineless” and the people of the country were yearning for a change, he said.

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