Man gets life imprisonment for murdering teenage Indian wife in London
Chandigarh, October 7: People’s Party of Punjab Manpreet Singh Badal today called upon Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal to own up moral responsibility for the catastrophe that has hit Punjab and quit as it was rooted either in non-governance or active collusion of those in power with the perpetrators of this crime that has so far claimed 17 suicides by the farmers.
He said with thousands of litres of spurious pesticides being destroyed by the dealers every day in the state after raids started, it was clear that the issue was not just the purchase of Rs 33 crore of pesticides by the agriculture department by-passing the procedure but the big scam that has surfaced with cotton crops having been destroyed in lakhs of acres in the state this year hitting hard the economy in general and that of cotton growers in particular.
He demanded a high level probe, at least by the CBI, into the entire racket of sale of spurious pesticides and seeds along with going into the source of such pesticides along with the involvement of the government officials at every level that was getting exposed.
He said the racket of such a huge magnitude was going on either with the collusion of the people in the government at the higher level or resulting from lack of governance and on both these accounts, it was the Chief Minister who was morally responsible.
“Somebody at some level must accept responsibility for the daily suicides by the cotton growers. Farmers in the cotton belt are in no position to cultivate next crop without incurring further loans. Apart from the daily loss of precious human lives, the loss due to spurious pesticides runs into thousands of crore. The situation calls for in depth probe to go into the roots of the scam”, he stressed.
Queering the pitch for higher compensation, he asserted the issue was not of compensating the ruined farmers for the cost of input they incurred but also to enable them to survive and cultivate next crop without becoming victim of the vicious system of taking loans from the commission agents.
He also called for softer loans to the crisis hit farmers from the banking system by suitably amending the norms.
