Farmers Protest In Front Of Dharmapuri Arvind's House

Accusing him of failing to bring a turmeric board and demanding his resignation from his Lok Sabha seat, farmers staged a dharna in front of the residence of BJP MP Dharmapuri Arvind in Nizamabad town today.

They also threw turmeric in front of his house and raised slogans against him.

Farmers alleged that in March 2019, Arvind had vowed in writing and even signed on a non-judicial (bond) stamp paper that he would get a turmeric board in 5 days if he was elected to Parliament.

"Arvind had promised the farming community in the Nizamabad Lok Sabha constituency in the run-up to the 2019 Lok Sabha elections that if elected as MP, he would bring the turmeric board sanctioned to the district, and that he would get proper minimum support prices fixed for both turmeric and red jowar," a farmer said.

"However, in the last three years he could get only an allocation of Rs 1.92 crore for close to 1 lakh turmeric-producing farmers. If you divide it between all of us, it boils down to less than Rs 200 per head. All he did was deceive farmers by distributing a bond paper," he added

The farmers said that the RTI had revealed Dharmapuri's false claims about the turmeric board.

Holding the RTI report, the agitators accused the MP of making tall claims of getting a Rs 100 crore allocation when for the year 2020-21, only a sum of Rs 1,18,71,000 was allocated out of which Rs 75 lakh was assistance for boilers and Rs 43.71 lakh was for assistance towards turmeric polishers.

Similarly, for 2021-22, a total of Rs 74.81 lakh was allocated, and Rs 39.73 lakh went towards assistance for boilers, Rs 6.58 lakh for turmeric polishers, Rs 15 lakh in assistance towards Silpaulin sheets, Rs 10 lakh towards assistance to the spice producers' group in the identified cluster, and Rs 3.50 lakh for setting up basic quality testing equipment.

"If he failed to keep both commitments, he had said that he would resign as a Member of Parliament and join the farmers' and people's movements," the agitating farmers said.