Uttar Pradesh Congress demanded to immediately comply with the order of the High Court and cleared all dues of the cane farmers by October this year so that they would not face the problems which they had to suffer last year. The Party also threatened to lunch a big agitation across the state if justice has been not given to the farmers and state government continued to connive with the mills owners.
``It is shame on the Samajwadi Party government that they had done nothing for welfare of the cane growers and now for the last few years, they were also not ensuring that their arrears should be cleared by the mill owners as well as the government themselves”, alleged spokesman of the UPCC, Amarnath Agarwal. He was demanding to immediately comply with the Court’s order and clear all the pending dues.
``The government must cleared all the dues by October this year and should also ensure that an interest of 15 percent per year should be included in it as per the earlier government orders in this year”, added Agarwal, while threatening that if the Government now not support the cane growers that the Congress would take up their fight.
Blaming the SP government for poor conditions of the cane growers in the state, Agarwal, said that the government had connived with mill owners hence they were not raising minimum support price (MSP) of the cane despite of known that the production is getting costlier by every passing years due to increase in prices of urea, pesticides, diesel etc. He also claimed that due to this apathetic approach of the government towards the farmers, many of them had either stopped growing cane or were forced to commit suicide just due to growing debts. He also blamed the State government for not using fund sent by the previous United Progressive Alliance government just to clear the dues of the farmers. ``Even the fund sent by UPA government has been not used by the present state government to clear farmers dues’, asserted Amarnath accusing SP Government as anti-farmers.