CHANDIGARH – The Punjab Chief Minister Mr. Parkash Singh Badal today demanded that the minimum support price of Wheat be fixed at Rs.1800 per quintal for 2012-13 to account for the massive increase in the cost of agricultural inputs which had put a burden of Rs.800 crore on the already beleaguered peasantry.
In a statement, the Chief Minister said that his demand was based on a study on the impact of recent hike in prices of farm inputs conducted by the experts of the Punjab Agricultural University Ludhiana.
Mr. Badal described as “cold-blooded and inhuman” the Centre’s opposition to the already inadequate recommendations by the Commission on Agriculture Costs and Prices (CACP) which had asked the Union Ministry of Agriculture to raise the MSP by a meager 10%. “Have the costs of agricultural inputs gone up by just 10%? Also has the increase in the prices of essential commodities risen only by that margin? If not, what is the basis for a highly discriminatory MSP of Wheat”, asserted Mr. Badal.
Mr. Badal also lashed out against the Congress party and the UPA for its anti farmer bias. The Chief Minister said that one hand the prices of major agricultural inputs like Diesel and fertilizers have already increased manifold in the recent past but on the other hand by making such reckless proposals and subsequently back tracking on them the Union government was trying to rub salt into the wounds of the distressed farming community which was already reeling under the mounting debt. Mr. Badal said that such a negligible hike in the MSP of Wheat at a time when the prices of the agricultural inputs, especially the DAP and Urea had touched the sky would break the back of peasantry as the agriculture profession already not a profitable proposition now due to its anti-farmer policies.
The Chief Minister cautioned if the Centre does not desist from implementing such anti-farming policies then Union government would be solely responsible for the decay of agriculture thereby leaving the nation’s entire peasantry in quandary especially of the Punjab.
