Declare Agriculture Emergency, Demands T-Congress

The Telangana Congress on Thursday demanded that the Telangana government declare an "agriculture emergency" in the state.

Addressing a press conference at Gandhi Bhavan, Leader of the Opposition in the Telangana Legislative Council Mohammed Ali Shabbir said that having suffered heavy losses in two successive crops, the farmers of Telangana were in extreme distress, and therefore the state government should declare an agriculture emergency to effectively handle the situation.

He accused both the central and the state governments of having failed to help the farmers.

"Deficient rains and erratic power supply caused heavy losses to farmers in the Kharif season. The agriculture sector registered a decline of 21.30% in 2014-15. While the areas under food grains came down by 19%, oilseed production got reduced by almost 11%. The sowing was reduced by almost 35%, and the conditions drove more than 700 farmers to suicide after the Kharif season. Despite these losses, the TRS government neither declared any mandals as drought-hit nor submitted a report to the Centre seeking assistance," he said.

"Due to unseasonal rains in the last few days, farmers lost crops spread over more than one lakh acres. Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao has maintained a criminal silence on all these damages, and did not even call for a meeting of the Disaster Management Committee to assess the damages," Shabbir Ali said.

He also accused the Chief Minister of treating farmers like enemies. He said that the state government had not provided compensation as per GO Ms No 421 issued by the then Congress government in June 2004, to the families of the farmers who had committed suicide. He said that the neighbouring Andhra Pradesh had, on the contrary, increased the compensation amount from Rs 2 lakhs to Rs 5 lakhs by replacing the GO 421 with GO Ms No 2014.

He also said that by clearing the loan waiver amount in installments, the Chief Minister had enslaved the farmers for a period of four years. Since their previous loan amounts were yet to be cleared, the banks had not released the farmers' documents. Consequently, they were unable to apply for fresh loans.

"The State Government should stand guarantee to the uncleared loans and ensure release of all documents to the farmers," he demanded. (INN)