Telangana govt should pay Rs 4,200 crore to farmers: BJP leader Gudur Narayana Reddy

HYDERABAD: Bharatiya Janata Party senior leader Gudur Narayana Reddy on Saturday demanded chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao to pay Rs 4,200 crores towards compensation to farmers who did not cultivate paddy in 17 lakh acres following the advice from the TRS government.
He sought to remind that in the past the chief minister had announced that the state government would not procure paddy and advised the farmers not to cultivate the crop in the Yasangi season.
On chief minister K Chandrasekhar Rao and TRS government's advice lakhs of farmers cultivated alternate crops instead of paddy. These categories of farmers were in addition to those who did not cultivate anything as their soil was suitable for only paddy cultivation.
"But after the BJP exerted pressure on the government, the chief minister made a U-turn and announced recently that paddy would be procured. This has left lakhs of farmers who did not sow paddy in disarray," he said.
The fluctuating stand of CM KCR on paddy procurement created confusion among the farmers and has left many of them worried as at one point of time the CM said the state will not procure paddy and another time he demanded that the Centre purchase it and now the state government has started arrangements to procure paddy.
Narayana Reddy alleged that the CM KCR tried to derive political mileage out of the paddy issue by blaming the BJP government for the crisis. The Narendra Modi-led BJP government has always maintained that it will purchase raw rice from Telangana.
Apart from this the Chief Minister has brought up a ridiculous argument that the Centre should purchase paddy and not rice. This was meant to blackmail the Centre, Narayana Reddy alleged.
Due to the delay on the part of the KCR government to start the paddy procurement process, several farmers were compelled to sell their agricultural produce at a much lower rate than the MSP to the rice millers and private traders.