Farmers’ suicides: Parliamentary panel to visit Vidarbha Friday

Nagpur : A parliamentary panel will visit Vidarbha Friday to review the situation in the wake of farmers’ suicides in the region, an activist said here Thursday.

“The committee will go to Pandharkawda in Yavatmal district of the region and also visit villages nearby, to find out why farmers suicides continue unabated despite several relief measures taken by the government,” said Kishor Tiwari, president of Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti (VJAS), an activist group working for cotton farmers’ rights in Vidarbha, of the visit of the 37-member panel headed by Basudeb Acharya of the Communist Party of India-Marxist.

Tiwari said that the panel members will be taken to nearby villages of Bhamraja and Maregon to study the ground realities. He, however, expressed concern that such visits are often derailed by the administration.

“We have witnessed that in all such previous official visits – from the Planning Commission’s fact finding mission in February 2005 culminating into Prime Minister Manmohan Singh’s much-spoken about tour in the June-July 2005, to the several other high profile official visits, the administrative machinery is seen to almost entirely hijack the itinerary,” Tiwari said.

“It inevitably resulted in them getting only an official view of the issue. We therefore write to you to express our fear that the scheduled visit of your team should not be derailed by the administration, and hope you’d also visit farmers and farm activists,” he added.

Tiwari also said that the bailout package of Rs.3,750 crore announced by the prime minister and the state’s bailout package of Rs.5,000 crore have failed to stem the farmers’ suicides.

Tiwari said that as many as 918 farmers from Vidarbha region ended their lives because of agrarian crisis in 2011. He also demanded immediate intervention of the PMO in this regard.

“In Yavatmal 35 farmers’ suicides in 2010 were approved for government compensation and this figure has touched 76 in 2011. As many as 2,332 farmers committed suicides in Yavatmal district alone since 2000 and of them only 714 were found eligible for compensation,” Tiwari said.

“We hope that the parliamentary committee take a note of these and come up relief measures at the earliest,” added Tiwari.