Demanding compensation for the cotton farmers, who lost their produce due to whitefly, ludhiana MP Ravneet Singh Bittu and hundreds of Youth Congress leaders and workers were cane-charged by the Punjab Police on Wednesday as they forcefully tried to enter the premises housing the office of the Deputy Commissioner.
Besides Bittu, Senior Congress leaders and party MlAs Ajit Inder Singh Mofar, Bharat Bhushan Ashu, and others were also injured in the lathi-charge.
As police placed barricades at all entry points, Bittu and other Congress workers tried to jump over them and were cane-charged. Bittu's turban also came undone in the scuffle, while a policeman was injured.
After staging a dharna on the road outside the District Administrative Office, the protesters were arrested, packed into police vans and taken to various police stations.
Earlier, the protesters jumped the gates and scaled the walls of the office of the Agriculture Department and smashed down the door at the office after the police failed in stopping them from entering the office.
Bittu, addressing the party workers, demanded to set up special investigation team under the direct supervision of the sitting Judge of the Punjab and Haryana High Court into the multi-crore pesticide scam.
Bittu said that the state Agriculture Minister Tota Singh should be sacked for his alleged negligence into this pesticide scam. “The total loss to the farmers due to white fly is pegged at around Rs1,200 crore, while the purchases made by the director agriculture went to the tune of Rs33 crore against his power of just not purchasing more than Rs10 lakh,” he pointed.
lambasting on the Punjab government for the failure in not getting funds for the paddy procurement from the Centre, Bittu said that the State Government is still trying to get the funds to the tune of Rs22,000 crore needed to buy over 135 lakh tones of the paddy for which the procurement starts from Thursday.