CM Captain Amarinder Singh counters oppn with data on farmer suicides

In a statement issued on Monday, Amarinder said even a single farmer’s death was a matter of pain and concern for him.

PUNJAB CHIEF Minister Captain Amarinder Singh Monday cited official data to rubbish the opposition’s claims that suicide by farmers in the state had doubled since his government announced farm loan waiver and assured that the notification to formally implement the waiver would be issued shortly.

In a statement on Monday, the CM, while quoting the data available with the state, said a total of 997 farmer suicides had been reported from March 2007 to March 2017, when the SAD-BJP regime was in power. Of these, 155 took place between January and December 2015 and 225 in 2016, the last two years of the Badal rule, which saw a sharp spike in the number of such incidents as more and more distressed farmers started taking the extreme step since conditions went from bad to worse, with no hope for succour, he added.

The CM further stated that the period, March-September, also clearly showed that far from increasing, the number of suicide cases involving farmers had actually declined in 2017 against the corresponding period of the previous year. From 153 in March-September 2016, the figure had come down to 131 in the same period this year, in sharp contrast to the claim of the leader of Opposition, Sukhpal Singh Khaira, that 250 farmers had taken their lives in the past six months.

In a statement issued on Monday, Amarinder said even a single farmer’s death was a matter of pain and concern for him. He said the necessary notification to relieve the affected farmers of their debt burdens, which had been mounting over the years due to government apathy to their problems, was all set to be issued in the next few days and the government was in the process of finalising modalities for the same.

He reiterated that those farmers covered in the first phase of the loan waiver, as announced in the Assembly, need not pay a single paisa of their loans. The ball for the waiver of loans up to Rs 2 lakh for farmers with up to 5 acres of land and payment of Rs 2 lakh to other small and marginal farmers had been set rolling in June itself when the announcement was made in the Punjab Assembly, the Chief Minister said, lashing out at the opposition. “Such fraudulent statements were discouraging the farmers and pushing them towards suicide by misleading them into believing that the government was not sincere in its commitment,” said Amarinder.