Crisis continues at the chilli market yard in Guntur, the largest in the State and the country, as a huge number of bags of chilli (3 lakhs, according to one estimate) have piled up at the market yard which remained closed since Saturday. The market will reopen on Wednesday.

Prices have crashed to less than Rs 5,000 per quintal this year from Rs 12,000-14,000 per quintal last year due to overproduction and glut in the market. The State Government had announced a price support scheme, offering Rs 1,500 more per quintal in addition to the market price, and the scheme is being implemented from April 20.

Since April 20, farmers from different districts of Andhra Pradesh as well as some districts of Telangana are bringing the produce to the yard on a large scale, though the scheme is not applicable to farmers from Telangana. The market is swamped with chilli bags and there is no room at the cold storage units here or elsewhere in the neighbouring districts.

As the chilli market crisis continued, the Opposition Y S R Congress leader, Y S Jagan Mohan Reddy, began a two-day "deeksha" (protest programme) here on Monday, the May Day, in the vicinity of the chilli market yard, demanding that the State Government take urgent steps to ensure remunerative prices to chilli, turmeric and other crops.

He alleged that the Telugu Desam-BJP Government was completely ignoring the interests of the farmers in spite of the many promises made in the election manifesto.

He reminded the Telugu Desam Party that in its poll manifesto during 2014, it had promised to set up a price stabilisation fund with a corpus of Rs 5,000 crores to provide remunerative prices to crops, but it had failed to fulfill the promise. That was why farmers of chilli, turmeric and other crops were suffering great hardship in the State, Jagan Mohan Reddy alleged.

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