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Somnath: spare farmers from sectarian politics

— PHOTO: P.V. SIVAKUMAR

Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee with the Best Telugu Rural Journalist awardees: (second from left) V. Udayalakshmi , R.M. Umamaheswara Rao and G. Srinivas. At left is Magsaysay awardee P. Sainath, Rural Affairs Editor of the The Hindu.

HYDERABAD: Lok Sabha Speaker Somnath Chatterjee underlined here on Sunday the need for treating farmers’ issues with utmost sincerity and commitment and viewing the whole issue as a “national challenge” and responsibility, than adopting a partisan attitude.

The agrarian sector should not be allowed to become a “victim of politics of confrontation and intolerance” and farmers should not be used as a pawn in the game of sectarian politics. Matters concerning farmers should be viewed as vital national issues and political parties should work together to address them with a sense of priority and in a national perspective, he said. Mr. Chatterjee was speaking after giving away the Best Telugu Rural Journalist award instituted by Foundation for People’s Journalism.

The Speaker said confrontational politics and the visibly competitive journalism were doing enormous damage to “our body polity today” and ‘we can hope to correct those aberrations in the culture of politics’ with the efforts of well-meaning individuals and institutions.

Mr. Chatterjee expressed concern over debilitating factors such as acute poverty, indebtedness and illiteracy that forced farmers to commit suicide, which was “a blot on the nation’s collective conscience.”

Schemes such as the National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme had been launched, but it was important to ensure honest implementation of such programmes and their effective monitoring.

Steps should be initiated to improve productivity and employment generation in the agriculture sector. It was imperative to bring about structural changes of which land reforms were the primary need, as support prices and cheap credit would not help beyond a point.

Institutional reforms in ownership of agricultural land would help in increasing the food grain production and thereby assist in addressing poverty and distress experienced in the rural areas.

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