Waive farm loans: Seechewal

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Sultanpur Lodhi, Dec 19

During the ongoing winter session of the Parliament, Rajya Sabha member and environmentalist Balbir Singh Seechewal raised the issue of farmer suicides in the Rajya Sabha.

Referring to a report, he said that from 2017 to 2021, about 53,000 farmers and labourers died by suicide because they did not get the right price for their crops. He said the condition of the farmers of the country was very pathetic, the farmers who had been feeding the countrymen till date were sleeping hungry. “It is a matter of great sadness that till now the farmers are not getting the minimum support price (MSP) of each crop. In such a situation, when will the food producers of the country get the right price for their crops and when will farming become a profitable business,” said Seechewal on Monday, adding that these were the big questions that were standing in front of the agriculture sector.

Referring to the sit-in protest by the farmers during 2021, Seechewal said the demands accepted by the Central government during the farmer’s movement had not yet been met. He demanded that all those demands should be fulfilled soon. Referring to Punjab, Seechewal said Punjab was contributing 40 per cent to the country’s grain reserves every year. He said Punjab had only one and a half percent of cultivable land, but Punjab alone was using a total of nine percent of the fertilizers and pesticides used in the country. Due to which its air, water and earth were getting polluted. Hence, the need of the hour was to return to natural farming and adopt agricultural diversification. For this, the Central government should make a concrete policy. Whenever the agriculture sector in the country had been hit by natural calamities, Punjab’s contribution to the country’s central grain reserves had been the highest. He urged the Central government to implement Swaminathan’s recommendations.

Seechewal said proper compensation should be given to the farmers for the damage caused to their crops due to floods, droughts or other natural calamities and in order to get the farmers out of debt trap, the loans of the farmers should be waived like the loans of the corporates, so that the farmer of the country could sleep peacefully at night.