Jakhar accuses CM of double standards on relief to farmers
Saturday, 10/10/2015
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CHANDIGARH: Congress Legislature Party (CLP) leader Sunil Jakhar on Friday accused Punjab chief minister Parkash Singh Badal of adopting double standards in distributing compensation among farmers who had lost their cotton crop due to the whitefly attack.
Jakhar said the Badal government was applying one yardstick to give compensation to farmers when it came to his home districts Muktsar and Bathinda, but a different one in the case of Fazilka district, where cotton crop on 2.3 lakh acres was destroyed by the whitefly.
Jakhar said he had information that Akali halqa incharge Dayal Singh Kolianwali gave a cheque for `94,000 as compensation to a farmer of Saranwa Bodla village (Muktsar), who owned 12 acres of agricultural land. In Fazilka and other areas of Punjab, the government has set a bar that a farmer can get compensation only up to 10 acres, even if he owns more agricultural land, the CLP leader said.
He stated that if the Badal government continued to discriminate with farmers on the basis of political constituencies, he would stage a dharna outside the chief minister’s residence. “I will wait for a week and if the government fails to do course correction, I will sit outside Badal’s residence in Chandigarh,” said Jakhar.
He said `8,000 per acre compensation was meagre and did not even recover the cost of labour.
