Punjab Congress president Capt Amarinder Singh on Friday charged the Badal Government of pushing the poor farmers of the State to the brink of suicide by its alleged failure to ensure timely procurement of their paddy.
“We have stopped our ongoing Punjab Express campaign and I have asked all leaders and workers in the border areas to assist farmers in procurement,” Capt Amarinder said in a statement issued here.
“I will personally be camping in a border village in the Amritsar-Taran Taran district from October 10 to ensure that the produce of the farmers, who were unnecessarily evacuated in the wake of India’s surgical strikes in PoK, reaches the mandis and is procured without problems,” he announced.
Captain Amarinder demanded prompt redressal of the concerns of the farmers to save them from disastrous consequences.
The former Chief Minister appealed to the farmers not to resort to the extreme step of taking their lives. “It’s just a matter of few months before the corrupt Badal Government is ousted. As soon as the Congress is in power, your woes will come to an immediate end," he said.
The situation is even more critical in the border villages, where the delay in shifting the grain to the mandis, caused by the untimely and unwarranted evacuation, has left the farmers devastated, said Captain Amarinder.
He criticised the mess on the procurement front, pointing out that the kharif crops were piling up, and in fact rotting, in the state mandis because the procurement process had failed to keep pace with the flow of paddy into the grain markets . "With as much as 30 per cent of the total paddy arriving in the mandis remaining unprocured so far the situation is extremely grim," Captain Amarinder said.