TS planning board vice chairman welcomes repealing of farm bills
K M Dayashankar
Demands the Centre to remove Cess on petroleum products
KARIMNAGAR: TS Planning Board Vice Chairman B Vinod Kumar has welcomed Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s decision to repeal the controversial farm bills and saying ‘sorry’ to the farmers, who had been waging a fight against the Union government for over the past one year against the bills.
Expressing concern over 1200 farmers’ deaths during the last one year due to their agitations against the farm laws, he suggested that the government should provide reasonable compensation to the bereaved farmers’ families on a humanitarian ground.
Talking to newsmen here on Friday, Mr Vinod Kumar said that Chief Minister K Chandrashekhar Rao’s maha dharna in Hyderabad along with his cabinet colleagues, MPs, MLAs and MLCs and party leaders was also one reason for the Prime Minister to repeal the controversial farm bills. In the wake of ‘BJP hatao – desh bachao’ campaign going on in northern India and also elections round the corner to Punjab, Uttar Pradesh and Uttarakhand states, the Union government had announced repealing of the farm acts, he stated.
Similarly, he demanded that the Prime Minister also announce removal of cess on the petroleum products and allocate the collected cess to the respective states exchequer. He flayed the Union government for increasing the petroleum products prices even after the crude oil price was very low in the international market.
Ridiculing the state BJP president and Karimnagar MP Bandi Sanjay dual standards on the farmers’ issues and provoking them to cultivate only paddy, he asked whether he knows about the Union government clearly stating that they would not procure paddy cultivated during the rabi season. Reminding that there was huge paddy production throughout the world, he said that the farmers should be educated to take up alternate crops to reap riches instead of solely relying on paddy cultivation.
He flayed the BJP state president for planning to organize agitations against the petroleum products prices in the Telangana on pretext of imposition of VAT. Reiterating that the Telangana government had not imposed any VAT on petrol, he said that the Union government had imposed heavy cess on petrol and demanded the BJP leader to ensure that the cess was removed.
He also alleged that the Union government had diverted all the fertilizers required for the Telangana state to the poll related states in north India. Manakondur legislator Rasamayi Balakishan, former legislators Arepalli Mohan and Konduru Satyanarayana Goud, former Mayor S Ravinder Singh and others were also present.
