A day before Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s rally at Gurdaspur in Punjab, his rivals—the ruling Congress party in Punjab and the principal opposition Aam Aadmi party (AAP) — targeted him on variety of issues, including farm debt waiver, NDA led Central Government’s failure on all fronts, among others.
Punjab Congress president Sunil Jakhar nailed Modi’s “lie” on the Congress-led Ounjab Government’s farm debt waiver scheme by releasing a complete list of 4,14,275 beneficiary farmers, along with their names, with an average waiver amount, per farmer, of Rs 56,737 towards cooperative bank loans and Rs 1,62,830 towards commercial bank loans.
Jakhar, Gurdaspur MP, has also written to the Prime Minister, urging him to rise above party lines to exercise his own judgement in the allocation of central government resources to ensure that the country’s beleaguered farmers get their due share.
Sharing the list of Punjab’s beneficiaries of farm debt waiver scheme, Jakhar declared that it was obvious that Modi had lied on the issue and that he had no empathy for the woes of the distressed farmers.
Jakhar, in his letter to the Prime Minister which he submitted to the latter’s office in the Parliament House, expressed dismay at Modi’s comments in Dharamshala on December 27, on the farm loan waiver schemes announced by the newly-elected Congress Governments in Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh and Rajasthan.
“Not only had the Prime Minister insensitively dubbed these schemes as an attempt to fool the farmers, but had come out with a shockingly misleading statement that the Congress government in Punjab had done nothing on its poll promise of loan waiver to the farmers and not even a single farmer had got any relief from the state,” Jakhar wrote in the letter.
Writing as a member of the Congress party and a humble farmer who has always worked for the upliftment of the farming community, Jakhar sought to clear the Prime Minister’s misconceptions with detailed data of the Punjab government’s farm debt waiver.
“In the past one year, the State Government has waived off crop loans of 4,14,275 farmers worth Rs 3,417 crores. The average amount of relief per farmer works out to Rs 56,737 towards cooperative bank loans and Rs 1,62,830 towards commercial bank loans,” he said.
Jakhar further noted that even it continued with its phased programme of loan waiver to Punjab’s 10.25 lakh most distressed small and marginal farmers, the Punjab government was set to soon be announcing loan waiver for landless labourers, as was promised before the election.
Jakhar pointed out that over the last four and a half years, since Modi took over, the Central Government has had a windfall gain of approximately Rs 13 lakh crores on account of low international prices of crude oil.
What’s more, your government has also accepted the seventh Pay Commission Report, and its mere acceptance will result in an additional expenditure of Rs one lakh crores every year, Jakhar pointed out to the Prime Minister, adding that all this showed that though funds were available with the union government, fixing of priorities for their distribution was missing.
CENTRE FAILED ON ALL FRONTS: MANN
Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) MP from Sangrur Bhagwant Mann on Wednesday said that Narendra Modi-led Government at the Centre had failed on all front to live up to the aspirations of the people of this country.
Terming Modi’s 95-minute interview to ANI on a spectrum of issues as “a mere political gimmick to misleading people of the country” on the promises that he made during the 2014 Lok Sabha elections, Mann said that the interview was a mere cover-up exercise by the “pradhan sewak” to hide BJP’s failures and foibles during its five-year rule.
Mann reiterated that in its first meeting after assuming power, the Union Cabinet had expressed its serious concern over the farm distress and decided to allow major loan waivers to ameliorating the lot of farming community.
“The interview was nothing but a complete turnaround on what the government had promised during the 2014 elections. The government had left the debt-ridden farmers across the country with no choice but to committee suicides,” he said.
Mann said that the saffron government had also backtracked on the issue of implementing the recommendations of Swaminathan Commission set up with a view to relieving the farmers of the distress, forcing them to take the extreme step. “The promised compensation on account of the cost of crop plus 50 percent went haywire due to lack of vision on the part of the government,” he said.
On the issue of employment, Mann said that the Modi government had miserably failed to live up to the aspirations of the youth of the country. “Modi had no plausible answer on the issue of employment generation,” he said.
Mann said that the Government in the saddle had come up with the demonetization in just single stroke saying that the exercise would bring back the black money purported to have been stacked in foreign banks.
“The ill-conceived idea boomeranged as it failed to bring back the black money. It was indeed a misguided missile on the part of the government,” he added.
Similarly, GST, too, was a ploy to benefit a handful of private corporate houses, which instead of doing any good to the common man, middle-rung industrialists and business house owners, has given them mere false hopes, he said.
Mann accused the Government for dividing the country on the basis of caste, colour and creed just to grab power. This is why people have made up their mind to get rid of the saffron party in the ensuing Lok Sabha elections due this year, if the decimation of the party in the recently concluded Assembly elections in the Hindi heartland states, besides Punjab, was any pointers.
Back home, the Captain Amarinder-led government, too, have played a cruel joke with the farming fraternity by not addressing the problems being faced by them in terms of farm waiver he had promised during the Assembly elections in the state, he said.
Similarly, on the issue of generation of employment in the state, his government had failed to deliver, Mann said.