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UNPA blames UPA for farmers plight |
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The United National Progressive Alliance, at its meeting in New Delhi on Tuesday, Dec. 18, launched a fresh attack on the Congress-led UPA for the farmers’ plight. The combine announced that its constituents would be holding a series of meetings across the country to highlight the agrarian crisis.
The UNPA roped in top agricultural scientist M.S. Swaminathan to speak on the issue from its platform shared by Samajwadi Party’s Mulayam Singh, TDP’s Chandrababu Naidu, INLD’s OP Chautala and AGP’s Brindaban Goswami. The UNPA demanded that the report compiled by Swaminathan, when he was the chairman of the National Commission on Farmers, should be implemented. “Till the condition of the farmers
improves, the country will not develop,” Mulayam said, after a daylong seminar titled “Farmers in India -Issues and Challenges”. The SP chief took a dig at
the Congress and said that though the party invokes Mahatma Gandhi the most it does not follow his principles of developing agriculture and empowering
India’s villages. Naidu said that while more than 78,000 farmers committed suicide in India between 1997 and 2001, 88,000 debt-ridden farmers had taken their own lives
between 2001 and 2005.
Chautala accused the Congress of ignoring farmers in its nearly 50 years of rule. “How can a government be so reckless about agriculture when
almost 70 per cent of the population is dependent on it,” he said.
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