BJP: Suicide by farmers continue in Vidarbha

NEW DELHI: Nearly a year after Prime Minister Manmohan Singh announced his relief package for farmers to stem the tide of suicides, the BJP claimed, suicide by farmers continues unabated.

On the eve of President Abdul Kalam’s visit to Vidarbha, the party sought to draw attention to the “continued neglect of agriculture by UPA government shows its ineptitude and lack of vision, which has culminated into a full-fledged agrarian crisis.” Condemning the UPA government’s utter neglect of agriculture, the BJP has demanded that the government convene an all party meeting to evolve a working strategy to revive the fortunes of millions of farmers.

Stating suicide by farmers has crossed the 1000 mark in the first five months of the current year, BJP spokesperson Prakash Javadekar said, “the much-hyped PM’s relief package has proved total failure to address the real causes of the crisis, and that is why not only number of farmers committing suicide has gone up but it is spreading to new areas and to new crops.”

The main opposition party has argued that farmer suicides are not limited to Vidarbha, nor is it limited to cotton. “Even those farming sugar cane which has had a good yield this year are committing suicide,” Mr Javadekar said.

The party spokesman said the government has consistently refused to heed the advice given by the National Commission on Farmers headed by Professor Swaminathan. “The agriculture minister, who is more the cricket minister, has not had any time to read the reports,” said Mr Javadekar.

According to the BJP, the crux of the problem is that the government is neither evolving a formula of remunerative prices nor creating a comprehensive insurance cover. They maintain the government has failed to provide adequate credit and increase the irrigation potential at a rapid pace.

It has also failed to guarantee minimum income for small and marginal farmers as well as ensure food security in real sense.

The BJP has demanded that the village must be a unit for insurance assistance and not the block as well as an increase in the limit of crop loans across the board.

The BJP’s criticism of the government’s handling of the farm sector has been echoed by experts who maintain that suicide by farmers are symptom of the crisis in the farm sector due to its prolonged neglect.

An RBI-appointed technical committee on alleviating rural indebtedness, which submitted its report in November suggested setting up of a self-sustaining Rural Credit Guarantee Scheme for making good non-wilful defaults, open up of trading in commodity options and enable banks to act as aggregators so that small and marginal farmers can partake in futures and options trading, and most significantly, enact a new ‘Moneylenders’ Regulation Act’ to protect small farmers from usurious rates of interest.