Chandigarh: Shiromani Akali Dal chief Sukhbir Singh Badal on Saturday urged Prime Minister Narendra Modi to direct the Union finance ministry to offer a comprehensive relief package for farmers.
In a statement here, Badal said the decision not to include the farming community in the ambit of the Centre’s scheme which seeks to provide ex-gratia payment of the difference between compound interest and simple interest to borrowers for six months proved that policymakers were total “out of sync with grassroots realities”.
“It is a sad day for Indian democracy if policymakers have become so out of touch with the agriculture sector that they do not realise that farmers bore the brunt of the COVID-19 pandemic. Thousands of tonnes of fruits and vegetables simply rotted in the fields. Farmers who had made investments in poly and net houses suffered huge losses as their produce could not be marketed for months. Everyone associated with agriculture and allied activities like dairy farming lost money. Even paddy growers in Punjab suffered huge losses as they had to pay double for labour,” Sukhbir said.
He said that farmers were expecting a complete waiver of their crop loans and waiver of interest on tractor loans as well as loans taken for other allied activities.
“It is shocking that instead of doing this, the Union government is not even ready to save them from compound interest being charged from them due to default in instalments. The finance ministry has played a cruel joke on the ''annadaata'' who put his life at risk to supply food to the nation during the pandemic,” he said.
He said that this amounts to rubbing salt into wounds of the farming community, which is already reeling due to forced distressed sale of food products during the pandemic.
Badal urged the prime minister to direct the ministry to come out with guidelines for banks which offer concrete relief to farmers who are unable to repay crop loans and pay interest on other loans, according to the statement.
He said farmers should not be discriminated against by issuing clarifications that agricultural loans will not be eligible for the interest on interest waiver announced by the Centre.
Badal said this announcement is being seen as a double whammy by the farming community which was still reeling from the “ill-effects” of the Centre’s agri-marketing laws which resulted in losses to maize and cotton farmers in Punjab and working to the detriment of farmers across the country.
Meanwhile, Punjab Health minister Balbir Singh Sidhu said the BJP-led union government has once again exposed its “anti-farmer face” by excluding farmers'' loans from the scheme.