More relief to distressed farmers on anvil: Finance Minister Arun Jaitley

NEW DELHI: Concerned over woes of farmers on account of unseasonal rains and hailstorms and farmer suicides, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley today said that Government will take more steps to provide liberal relief to the distressed lot.

"As far as the immediate problem is concerned, you have to be liberal in distributing relief and in terms of being liberal, the first thing that we have done is increased by 50 per cent the aid given to them during the UPA period.

"I concede it's not enough, I would personally prefer to even give more and I can assure everybody that 50 per cent is the first step and many more steps are going to come," Jaitley said.

Earlier this month, Prime Minister Narendra Modi had announced higher compensation for crop damage of farmers hit by unseasonal rains and hailstorm and eased criteria for them to avail government support.

As part of that, the amount of compensation given to farmers has been increased to 1.5 times.

"If earlier, he was getting Rs 100 as compensation, now he will get Rs 150, if it was Rs 1 lakh, he will get Rs 1.5 lakh... A 50 per cent increase," Modi had said.

Unseasonal rains and hailstorm last month have destroyed crops and even lead to farmer suicides.

Jaitley said the long term solution is not invest in irrigation projects.

"You have to have a long term solution, you cannot have a patch work solution where you have a hailstorm and have people dying, you cannot have once crop going wrong and people committing suicide. Therefore you have to go to the root of the problem," he told news channel Times Now.