With unseasonal rains causing loss of standing crops over lakhs of hectares in Haryana, Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar on Tuesday urged Union Consumer Affairs, Food and Public Distribution Minister Ram Vilas Paswan and Minister of State for Agriculture Sanjeev Kumar Balyan who had been sent by Prime Minister Modi to assess the ground situation to provide a special assistance of Rs. 1136 crore to the affected farmers.
For his part, Mr. Paswan claimed that the pro-poor and pro-farmer Modi Government would protect the interests of the farmers.
During his interaction with the Central ministers, Mr. Khattar also urged the Centre to provide Rs.100 bonus per quintal over and above the minimum support price of wheat and to relax standard quality norms for wheat procurement in current Rabi season.
He also suggested formulating a five factor slab system for assessing the loss to crop so that every farmer could get benefit of compensation announced by the government. He said that compensation should be calculated in the slabs of loss ranging from 0-10 per cent, 11 to 25 per cent, 26 to 50 per cent, 51 to 75 per cent and 76 to 100 per cent. At present, the Central Government is not giving compensation on crop loss up to 50 per cent.
Mr. Khattar said Haryana Government has already ordered a girdawari or assessment of the loss due to unseasonal rain and hailstorm between March 1 and 22 and asked the Centre to provide an interim relief of Rs.500 crore to compensate the farmers.
He said the loss due to rain and hailstorm in the past few days was yet to be ascertained. Due to this, he said, the final report which was to come by March 31 has also been delayed by a week. The Chief Minister, however, assured that all the farmers will be compensated within a month of the final report.
Haryana has also demanded that besides the land owners, there should also be a provision to compensate the land tillers.
Haryana Agriculture Minister Om Prakash Dhankar said the draft Memorandum for Special Central Assistance from the Centre has been prepared by Haryana. It has sought assistance of Rs. 1136 crore under various categories.
Mr. Paswan assured the Haryana Government that wheat procurement norms would be relaxed in the wake of crop quality getting affected because of inclement weather. But the quantum of relaxation would be decided after a meeting of the State and Food Corporation of Indian officials, he added.
“We have been sent by Prime Minister Narendra Modi to assess the situation and will be submitting our report to him along,” he said.
