As part of efforts to intensify his party’s campaign against the Narendra Modi-led NDA Government’s controversial land Acquisition Ordinance, Congress vice-president Rahul Gandhi will embark on a tour of the farmers’ suicide belt of Amravati in eastern Maharashtra on Thursday. Gandhi, who left New Delhi by a train on Tuesday morning for Punjab to “see the condition of farmers in the State”, will arrive in Nagpur on Wednesday night.
On Thursday morning, Gandhi will set off from Amaravati town on his tour of the district which has seen maximum number of suicides by farmers in the recent past. His tour will take him to five villages — Gunji, Shahapur, Ramgaon, Ranjana and Toglabar – in Damangaon and Chandur talukas of Amravati district. During his tour, he will undertake a 15-km padayatra, visiting families of farmers who committed suicides in recent weeks, and other villagers.
Gandhi will be accompanied by former Chief Minister and current Maharashtra Pradesh Congress Committee (MPCC) president Ashok Chavan, AICC general secretary in-charge of Maharashtra Mohan Prakash and leader of Opposition in the Maharashtra Assembly Radhakrishna Vikhe-Patil. Briefing mediapersons on Gandhi’s Vidarbha tour, Chavan said that during his tour, the Congress vice-president would focus on the “failure” on the part of both the NDA Government at the Centre and the BJP-led saffron alliance Government in Maharashtra to address the plight of distressed farmers in the State and check the recurring suicides in Maharashtra.
“The situation has worsened on the farmers’ suicides front, this year. The estimates made by the Maharashtra Government peg the number of farmers’ suicides in Maharashtra from January 1 2015 to March 31, 2015 at 622. This is a conservative figure. Our information is that as many as 1,200 farmers have committed suicides during this period. Amravati has recorded highest number of suicides (295), followed by Aurangabad in Marathwada where 215 farmers have ended their lives,” Chavan said.
The former Chief Minister said that most of the suicides by farmers were on account of the huge debts they owed to local money lenders, lack of financial assistance from the State and Central Governments, failure on the part of the State Government to ensure enumerative prices for their produce, lack of financial resources to prepare for the forthcoming agriculture season and financial problems faced by them on their domestic front.
Chavan charged that the State Government had failed to keep its promise of reaching relief to the distressed farmers. “Such is the distress witnessed within the farming community in the State that farmers as young as 23 years to farmers in their sixties and seventies are committing suicides,” the senior State Congress leader said. “During Gandhi’s tour, there will both be one-on-one interaction between him and the affected farmers and also a mass contact programme,F Chavan said.