Union Budget 2015: No Healing Touch to 3 Million Distressed Vidarbha Farmers-VJAS

Once again new NDA Govt. has failed to give any healing touch in his policy road map budget -2015 distressed 3 million dry land farmers which are growing cash crop like cotton and soybean in Vidarbha region of Maharashtra as there is no announcement of fulfilling PM Narendra Modi pre-poll promises on farm loan waiver and giving higher MSP according to a proposed formula of investment plus 50 per cent returns as indicated earlier that BJP is treating the issue of minimum support price (MSP) and waiver of farm loans as a ‘Kisan-Jumla’ (empty election promise) as there is no budgetary provisioning and plan to address the acute agrarian crisis with focus on credit, cost and crop issues hence to stop farmers suicides, a key farmers’ advocacy group in the drought-prone Vidarbha region, Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS) said in a press statement.

This year the Maharashtra state government officially declared that 60 per cent of its villages were facing a “severe drought” of the century, last year, affecting almost 90 lakh farmers in state. 23,811 of state’s total 39,453 villages fall under this category after complete kharif crop was damaged, there is international recession in cotton as global market and demand has been dropped and this will effect more than 40 million cotton farmers cultivating cotton in more than 12 million hector mostly dry land farmers hence union budget is talking big mega investment infrastructure and long term credit but failed to address core issues of giving direct relief package to these 40 million cotton farmers who are victims of global open market economy and mismatched demand supply situation ,NDA has sidelined the rural and agrarian crisis from its priority list When poor are demanding food under universal PDS and farmers are killing themselves due to debt and poor prices of agriculture produce,. This will make life of poor and farmer’s miserable, VJAS president, Kishore Tiwari, added.

It was made clear earlier Budget-2015 that NDA Govt. is not serious to address the core issue of crisis that are better cost and credit as it was reflected RBI Governor’s statement that all earlier farm loan waiver packages have failed to provide relief and such packages would add to banks’ NPAs and Indian Govt. an affidavit in the Supreme Court said the government cannot give the MSP on the basis of the BJP’s proposed formula of investment plus 50 per cent returns as it goes contrary to all existing formulae of the Commission on Agriculture Costs and Prices, this is very unfortunate as central Govt. failed to understand serious gravity of Vidarbha agrarian crisis when region has reported 1,160 farmers suicides in Maharashtra in 2014, and 124 in 2015 (till date), it was high time that the Centre looks at agrarian crisis seriously in Vidarbha and announce special plan to address existing despair,” Tiwari said while urging Prime Minister Narendra Modi to relook into Budget -2015 outlay .