‘Will join hands with industrial workers to protest against Centre’s policies’

Crop insurance scheme need of the hour, says farm unions’ leader

All India Kisan Sabha national president Ashok Dhawale addressing a farmers meet in Ongole on Wednesday. | Photo Credit: KOMMURI SRINIVAS

Farmer unions will join hands with industrial workers and other sections of people to spearhead a protracted struggle from next month to protest against the Centre’s anti-people economic policies, All India Kisan Sabha national president Ashok Dhawale said.

Over four lakh farmers had ended their lives between 1995 and 2020 as per the data compiled by the National Crimes Record Bureau(NCRB), and 25% of them occurred during the Narendra Modi regime as farming had become a losing proposition in the wake of ever-increase cost of farm inputs including seeds, fertilisers and pesticides on the one hand, and unremunerative prices for their produce on the other, he observed while speaking on the agrarian crisis in Ongole on Wednesday.

Mr. Dhawale, one of the key leaders of Samyukta Kisan Morcha, an umbrella organisation of farmers that forced the Centre to take back the three controversial farm laws, said only when farmers got minimum support price(MSP) as per the formula evolved by noted agriculture scientist M S Swaminathan(1-1/2 of times the cost of production) that they could continue in the profession.

Farmers should be provided debt relief as a majority of the growers were caught in a debt trap in the wake of gradual decline in institutional credit to the farm sector. “A comprehensive crop insurance scheme is the need of the hour as farming has increasingly become a gamble with the monsoon,” he explained.

He said they would hold a meeting in the first week of May and rope in representatives of other like-minded organisations to chalk out a series of agitation programmes to press for a fair deal to landless labourers and industrial workers reeling under the impact of rising prices of all essential commodities.

All secular, democratic forces should come together to fight against what he called “corporate communalism” pursued vigorously by the BJP and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh.

“We will take the toiling masses along with us by fighting for scrapping the new labour code and for hiking wages for workers under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme(MGNREGS) to ₹600 per day for enhanced work days of 200,” he said.