Potatoes dumped in front of UP CM’s Lucknow house
Tribune News Service
Lucknow, January 6
On a day quintals of potatoes were found dumped on a 5km stretch covering Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath’s residence and the Vidhan Sabha in Lucknow, the CM claimed at a rally in Meerut that Uttar Pradesh would become the first state in the country to double farmers’ income.
Addressing a public meeting at the Mohiuddin Sugar Mill compound in Meerut, Yogi said farmers of the state worked very hard they needed to be compensated adequately. He accused the previous BSP and Samajwadi Party governments of ignoring farmers’ interests.
Some unidentified persons reportedly dumped potatoes from Lohia Path to Vidhan Sabha in the dead of night. The unnerved district administration quickly cleared the road even as passers-by had a field day collecting potatoes.
No farmer body has owned up the protest. The Bharatiya Kisan Union, which had organised a similar protest last year after demonetisation by symbolically dumping potato and paddy crops outside the Vidhan Sabha, has denied being part of today’s protest.
BKU’s Uttar Pradesh spokesperson Avdesh Verma said farmers associated with their organisation did not dump their crop on the streets today.
Kisan Jagriti Manch’s Sudhir Kumar Panwar also expressed ignorance about the organisation or persons that might have dumped potatoes. Panwar, however, said he could understand potato farmers’ feeling of betrayal as the BJP government had not announced the minimum support price for potato despite promising to do so in its manifesto.
Nationalist Congress Party state president Ramesh Dixit said the move reflected farmers’ anger against the Yogi government. “The government had money to spend on Gorakhpur festival and painting buildings saffron, but not to alleviate suffering of farmers who are not even getting the cost price for their potato crop,” Dixit said.
