The People’s Movement of India has appealed to the State government to grant a solatium of Rs.10 lakh each to the families of three delta farmers who were alleged to have committed suicide fearing samba crop loss.
A resolution to this effect was passed at a consultative meeting of the organisation held Tiruchi on Sunday, according to its coordinator C.Nallasamy.
The meeting also urged the government to ensure that such suicides don’t recur in the future.
While seeking immediate release of water from Karnataka to save the standing crops in the delta region as 80 per cent of the crops are likely to wither shortly, the resolution wanted the Central government and the Supreme Court to attend to the issue with utmost urgency.
It deplored the step-motherly treatment by the State to rural areas where it has imposed power cut for almost 14 hours a day as against just two hours in Chennai. “This is unconstitutional,” it added. The discrimination in power supply should be removed and all the areas should be given power equally, it pleaded.
Similarly, it wondered how multinational companies were given uninterrupted power supply while the local units were allowed to languish without power. The MoUs for such power supply to the foreign industrial units were signed during the previous regime and also the current one. “This is injustice to the people of the State. Sons of the soil being discriminated against in their own soil is travesty of justice.”
Making a loud pitch for permitting toddy-tapping in the State, a resolution said that Tamil Nadu was the only State which had prohibited this.
This vocation does not need electricity and would be able to provide jobs apart from improving the rural economy. Toddy-tapping and consuming are constitutional rights, it asserted.
It also slammed the decision to allow foreign direct investment in retail saying that it would seriously hurt the country in the long run though initially it might look beneficial.
