Union Minister for Tourism, Culture and Northeast States G. Kishan Reddy has accused the Telangana Rashtra Samithi (TRS) government in the State of having “failed to provide the necessary technology to the rice millers or appropriate seeds to the farmers to see that paddy fit to be processed as raw rice alone is grown and not the one that has to be processed and sold as parboiled rice.”
“What has the State government done all these years to bring about a change in technology after having assured the Centre that steps will be taken to introduce measures to ensure only raw rice is produced and not one with high broken grain content which can only be processed as boiled rice? Has any effort been made to educate the farmers?” he questioned at a press conference in New Delhi.
Flanked by his party MPs, Bandi Sanjay Kumar and S. Babu Rao, the Member of Parliament from Secunderabad once again reiterated that this year’s entire produce, whether it is raw rice or fit for boiled rice, will be purchased by the Central government. “We want to assure the farmers that the Modi government is with them and every single grain will be purchased, please take your produce to the nearest procurement centre,” he said.
Mr. Kishan Reddy charged that there was a ‘conspiracy’ against the Centre to ‘mislead’ the farmers by giving them wrong information about procurement and leaving them in a confused state by the TRS government.
“Farmers should not be made to pay a price for political expediency of the TRS and Chief Minister K. Chandrasekhar Rao who is still smarting under the loss in Huzurabad byelection. His plans for elevating his son to the top post has been stymied, so he seems to be upset,” he remarked.
The Minister said procurement is a regular process and the policy is the same for the entire country. “It does not behove of the Chief Minister to put the farmers under duress to make them turn against the BJP, more so because the entire section voted against his party during the bypoll,” he claimed.
As a Cabinet Minister, he is ready to take up the responsibility to ensure that the entire paddy will be procured but he was not going to respond to ‘false utterances’ and ‘innuendos’ against the Central government by the TRS government and its ministers, he said. The State government has to, at least now, initiate an awareness programme to educate the farmers about the kind of seeds to be used and other scientific inputs but there has been no action plan in TS in the last seven years, he added.
