Bajwa slams Mann govt for announcing ‘meagre’ hike in SAP
Leader of Opposition (LoP) Partap Singh Bajwa on Friday slammed chief minister Bhagwant Mann for announcing a “meagre” hike in state agreed price
Chandigarh : Leader of Opposition (LoP) Partap Singh Bajwa on Friday slammed chief minister Bhagwant Mann for announcing a “meagre” hike in state agreed price (SAP).
Describing the increase of ₹11 announced by the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government to take the SAP to ₹391 a quintal as “highly condemnable”, Bajwa said the sugarcane growers and the Punjab Congress were demanding a hike of ₹20 per quintal in SAP to make it ₹400 per quintal.
The LoP said he was asking for this hike in SAP because the CO38 variety of sugarcane was marred by red rot and crop also got affected by floods in July and August.
Bajwa said the Congress government in Punjab in 2021 had increased the SAP by ₹50 per quintal, and the farmers will never forget this.
Referring to the CM’s statement, he said the government is not supposed to provide ‘shagun’ but to make a constructive hike in the crop prices to ease out the farming community. “What the Punjab CM has done is a mockery of the entire farming community. Once again it has been proven that the AAP government is anti-farmer. It never fulfilled its promises made to the farmers,” he alleged.
The Congress leader said many farmers in the flood-affected areas still have not been provided with compensation. He said they not only lost the paddy crop to floods but they could not carry out wheat sowing because their fields were covered with silt. The farmers have been forced to spend lakhs of rupees on desilting the farms in Gurdaspur, Tarn Taran, Ferozepur, Fazilka and Jalandhar districts,” he added.