The farmers’ organisation, Bharti Kisan Union (BKU), on Thursday strongly condemned the statement of Union Agriculture Minister Radha Mohan that increase in minimum support price (MSP) will not help farmers.
Reacting to “highly condemnable and imprudent statement”, the BKU leaders stated that why the Prime Minister Narendra Modi has made him a Union Minister of Agriculture “when he doesn’t understand the basics of Agriculture”.
The farmers’ organisation urged Modi to send Radha Mohan for a crash course in agriculture and agriculture economy.
“While the farmers are committing suicides due to financial hardships, Agriculture Minister is issuing such statements without realizing that farmers don’t control either input prices or the output prices,” said BKU national president Bhupinder Singh Mann.
Mann said: “Under the garb of green revolution, which was basically to feed other non-producing States, agricultural lands of Punjab have been over-exploited and per acre output has already peaked out. Still the yield of wheat in Punjab is comparable with USA. In that case, only way left to visualise Modi's catchphrase “double farm income in six years” is to either decrease input prices or increase MSP.”
BKU on Thursday held its meeting under the chairmanship of its Punjab president Baldev Singh Mianpur, where several important issues were discussed.
It was brought out in the meeting that in border and river side areas, farmers had been allotted lands through registry by Government and farmers are tiling on these lands for many years.
“Government had taken Rs 6,000 to Rs 12,000 per acre from farmers for these lands in years 1994 and 2002, 2006. Now Government is taking these lands back from the farmers and dislodging them,” said the BKU leaders while condemned the government’s move saying that BKU will support the victimised farmers.
“We will approach the President and not allow the government to dislodge farmers from custodian lands for which farmers have already paid to the government,” said Mann.
He said that an eight-member committee of BKU has been constituted which will visit the affected areas and farmers, video-graph it. We will meet the President based on this report, he added.