Chandigarh, August 2
Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal on Thursday sought a Rs 2,380-crore special package from the Centre for the state’s farming community that is reeling under one of the worst monsoon failures in recent history.

Seeking Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s “urgent, immediate and effective intervention” for providing relief to the state, Badal said Punjab farmers were facing a crisis of frightening magnitude and were making massive investments to save their paddy crop. He is likely to meet the PM shortly to press for the package, official sources said.

Giving details, the CM said farmers were likely to spend an additional Rs 550 crore to run generator sets on diesel to save paddy crop on around 27 lakh hectares. He said farmers were likely to incur an additional expenditure of Rs 300 crore to replace mono-block pumpset-operated tubewells with submersible pumpset-operated deep tubewells.

Apart from this, Badal said the Punjab State Power Corporation Limited (PCPL) would incur an additional expenditure of Rs 1,530 crore by diverting power from other sectors as well as purchasing power at a higher price. Additional cost on all these accounts would be Rs 2,380 crore, he said.

Badal said it was unfortunate that the financial packages announced for farmers in the country had bypassed the country’s leading agricultural state. He said farmers of the state, who had sacrificed their most precious asset of land fertility and water at the altar of national interest, had been pushed into a deep crisis due to the deficient monsoon, which hit them at the start of the paddy transplantation season.