BATHINDA: A day after the Punjab government launched the
loan waiver scheme for small and marginal farmers, farm labourers in the state have started mobilizing themselves to demand a similar package.
On Sunday, CM
Amarinder Singh had assured to take up waiver for farm labourers later in phases. However, on Monday, farm labourers started raising voice for loan waiver by holding a huge rally in Bathinda.
They asserted that farmers and farm labours were inseparable and they could not be singled out and denied the benefits of the debt waiver. They claimed that while announcing the waiver for farmers in June 2017, the state government had deliberately ignored them as they were not as well organized as the state farmers.
Though no official study about debt on farm labourers has been conducted, as per a survey conducted by labour organization
Punjab Khet Mazdoor Union (PKMU) in some villages of Muktsar, Bathinda and Faridkot, 84% labourers in these districts were under a debt of nearly Rs 91,000 per family.
What's more, the survey conducted by three universities of Punjab in 2017, of the nearly 15,000 suicides committed by persons associated with farming in the last 16 years, 45% were farm labourers.
According to an estimate of the
Punjab Agricultural University (PAU), Ludhiana, there are nearly 7 lakh farm labourer families in the state and most of these are under debt.
"The governments never paid any attention to the burgeoning loans of farm labourers and never tried to get some serious study conducted. Concerned over that we got conducted a study in September 2017, which we shared with the state-run universities in Punjab. According to the study, the farm labourers are equally prone to debt and subsequently to committing suicides, despite that the governments never thought of waiving off their loans," said PKMU president Zora Singh Nasrali and general secretary Lachhman Singh Sewewala.
