A team of Telugu Desam Party led by Telugu Raithu president Karanam Balarama Krishna and party vice-president Kala Venkata Rao held Government responsible for not compensating their losses. On Sunday they told farmers not to get disillusioned promising them to fight till the Government to get compensation for their losses.
Sharing the dais with the farmers, who were on a relay hunger strike here on Sunday, the two leaders said that the TDP would get compensation for the losses of farmers who forfeited the chance to raise a crop by announcing a crop holiday and also who lost their crop because the Government failed to supply water to irrigate their withering crop.
The team also called upon the kin of a farmer who reportedly committed suicide in Gampalagudem. A paddy farmer in Chouturu of G. Konduru Mandal told the visiting leaders that he could not water his paddy through any of the available means. The main source is rain and there were very few this season. Water released from Nagarjuna Sagar was consumed even before it reached his field and there was no power to pump groundwater, he lamented.
The team leaders said that farmers had announced crop holiday in a total of three lakh acres and standing crop had withered due to lack of water in 2.14 lakh acres.
Visits cotton fields
The team that included Mylavaram MLA Devineni Umamaheswara Rao and Nandigama MLA Tangirala Prabhakar visited the paddy and cotton fields in which standing crop had withered. They said that the party had sent teams to 16 districts in which farmers were facing various crisis. All the teams will submit a report to the TDP president N. Chandrababu Naidu.
The Congress Government in the State and the UPA at the Centre were not bothered about the plight of the farmers, alleged Mr. Balaramakrishna. The Central Ministers keep making the same statements with a gap of four months, but nothing gets done in between, said Mr. Venkata Rao. The Chief Minister N. Kiran Kumar Reddy was “forever writing letters” to the Prime Minister and Central Ministers about the plight of the farmers, but nothing seems to be happening, he observed.