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Chandigarh, September 14 – The Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) today asked the Congress government not to sprinkle salt on the wounds of suicide victim families by handing over invalid compensation cheques to them, even as he asked the government to give Rs ten lakh compensation and a government job to families of farm suicide victims as promised in its poll manifesto.
In a statement here, former minister Bikram Singh Majithia said far from giving Rs 10 lakh compensation to affected families, the Congress government was not even paying ongoing Rs five lakh compensation to them. He said the government had recently played a cruel joke on the family of a suicide victim of Rampura Phul by handing it a cheque with an invalid account number. “This shows the seriousness of the government on this sensitive issue”, he added.
Stating that the Congress government had made it clear to Punjabis that it would not waive off their Rs loans by repeatedly reneging on promises made in its election manifesto and in the Vidhan Sabha also, Mr Majithia said paying compensation to the families of suicide victims was the least it could do to help the distressed families. “Unfortunately even this is not being done in this government even though more than 200 farmers have committed suicide in the last six months”, he added.
The Akali leader said farmers were committing suicide in large numbers because they had put their faith in Congress due to its promise to waive off all farm loans be it from cooperative or nationalized banks or private money lenders. “The Congress party even got forms filled from farmers listing out their loan amounts in a move clearly aimed at befooling them to think this form would be the basis for the complete loan waiver. The party’s election manifesto framed by Manpreet Singh Badal also contained this promise but the finance minister is now refusing to honour the same”, he added.
Mr Majithia said now when the Congress had been elected to power it first tried to put off the loan waiver by forming a committee to examine this issue. “Then it announced the issue would be taken up in the budget. Despite all this it has refused to implement the Rs 90,000 crore loan waiver promise”, he added.
Asking the government not to play with the future of Punjab’s peasantry, the SAD leader enjoined the Congress to implement a complete farm loan waiver immediately. He also pointed out that compensation was not being given to families of farm suicide victims and that the government was also not implementing its promise to waive off their accumulated loans.
