Samyukt Kisan Morcha, the umbrella organisation of protesting farmers, said here on Friday that the announcement made by the Centre on Agriculture Infrastructure Fund is yet another jumla . The SKM said what farmers or their collectives need are not more loans, but freedom from indebtedness and a legally guaranteed remunerative price for their market interfaces.
‘No allocation’
The SKM said the reference by Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar on Thursday to ₹1-lakh crore worth Agriculture Infrastructure Fund is highly misleading because there has been no allocation of even a ₹1,000 crore from the Centre to such a fund. The farmers’ organisation said the Centre has merely created a new head under which loans can be accessed from banks.
“Only ₹208 crore were allocated for AIF in the revised budget of 2020-21, and ₹900 crore in the budget for 2021-22. Moreover, even in terms of loans, only ₹3,241 crore were sanctioned from AIF as of March 2021, whereas the AIF was announced to be a Covid-19 rescue package as though it would immediately infuse ₹1-lakh crore into agriculture,” the SKM said in a statement. The Centre, it added, has shown no commitment to build and expand the public market and storage infrastructure for the benefit of small farmers, but favoured the large corporates such as the Adanis, Walmart and Reliance to build private markets, storage and processing facilities, it charged.