Congress MP Deepender Hooda has stated that a recent report of the Standing Committee on Agriculture, which indicated that the government had surrendered more than Rs 1 lakh cr meant for welfare schemes of farmers, has exposed the anti-farmer face of the Union government. He said thousands of lives could have been saved with this money as more than 1 lakh farmers have committed suicide during the 10-year BJP rule in the country.
Addressing the press conference at the Indian National Congress headquarters here on Tuesday, Deepender said the decision of the Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare proved that the Agriculture Ministry has nothing to do with farmer welfare. He questioned if whether this agricultural budget of Rs 1 lakh cr was surrendered so that more loans of corporate houses could be waived off and difficulties would increase for the farmers.
“This data is going to rub salt on the wounds of the farmers, and open up wounds inflicted on the farmers by their own government. The NCRB data shows that during the rule of BJP government, more than 1 lakh farmers committed suicide from 2014 to 2022. That means 30 farmers are committing suicide every day,” he said.
“Suicides could have been prevented by providing relief to debt-ridden farmers with this Rs 1 lakh cr. Farmers are not cowards, they take tough decisions like suicide only when all their avenues are closed. For the past 5 years, debt-ridden farmers in the country have been forced to commit suicide, but the Agriculture Ministry of the Government of India has been silently surrendering lakhs of crores of Rupees,” he said.
Deepender reminded that the UPA government had provided relief to the farmers by waiving off loans worth Rs 72,000 crore in 2009, but this government has not waived off even a single paisa loan of the farmers in the last 10 years, but has also waived off loans worth Rs 14.5 lakh crore of big industrial houses.
He said this government is continuously inflicting wounds to the farmers and then after probing them to see how deep the wound is, nothing can be more unfortunate than this. He demanded that the government should explain why money allocated for welfare of farmers was surrendered. “The farmer must know who is responsible for this? Will the loans of those rich people, whose loans worth lakhs of crores have been waived off earlier also, be waived off with this Rs 1 lakh crore surrendered by the Agriculture Ministry,” he questioned.
Deepender said the government is showing inflated budget on paper, but is reducing the actual expenditure, which is nothing but cheating the farmers as this budget is not being spent. “There is a continuous decline in the agricultural budget being spent. The Standing Committee notes that in 2020-21 expenditure on Agriculture was 4.41 percent of the total budget, which decreased to 3.53 percent in 2021-22. In 2022-23 it became 3.14 percent and in the last financial year 2023-24 it became 2.57 percent,” he stated.
He said that the promise of doubling farmers’ income by 2022 also turned out to be a big deception, and added that the government not only failed to double farmer’s income, it managed to double to debt on farmers. Clarifying his point, he quoted government figures and said that according to NSSO, the annual income of a farmer in 2015-16 was Rs 8000 per month. If it is doubled according to the inflation index, then by 2022 the income of farmers should have become Rs 22,000 per month. But the income of farmers reached only Rs 10200 per month.