Bhopal: With just few days in power and midway through the Rabi season, the Congress is staring at an acute shortage of fertilizers which has agitated the farmers. This comes soon after the state government announced loan waiver for the farmers.
The farmers are alleging that the black marketing by private dealers has led to the shortage.
The government is now working to ensure sufficient supply of urea as chief minister Kamal Nath got in touch with union minister Sadanand Gowda urging him to improve supplies of the fertilizer.
The chief minister also spoke to union railway minister Piyush Goyal and urged to provide railway racks.
The Congress has accused the Centre of disrupting supplies of fertilizer deliberately. It also accused the Centre of distributing the state’s share of fertilisers to other states.
The opposition however passed the buck to the ruling Congress for failing to update the demand for urea on the portal, due to which the Centre did not offer additional supplies.
BJP MLA Rameshwar Sharma also blamed Congress for the mess. “It’s an old Congress practice of allowing middlemen to run away with chunk of supplies which leads to surge in prices, scarcity of fertiliser and intrusion of duplicate fertilisers in the market.” He accused the MP government of being responsible for the shortfall in supplies.
Khargone, Guna, Raisen, Ashoknagar, Vidisha, Sagar, Jabalpur, Rajgarh and other districts have reported short supplies of urea. The shortage triggered protests from farmers who are claiming that their standing crops would be destroyed if the fertiliser is not received soon. Gwalior-Chambal region also has reported short supplies of the fertiliser.
As a stop-gap arrangement, MP government has dispatched fertilizer stocks from NFL, Chambal Fertilizer Plant and IFFCO Plant to the affected areas where the fertilizer is in short supply.
Comments
0 comment