Agitated by the budget of the year 2020, the All India Kisan Sangharsh Coordination Committee (AIKSCC) has announced a nationwide protest against it on February 13. On Saturday, the committee said that the budget has “pro-corporate proposals and fails to address the concerns of the farmers in India.”
The AIKSCC issued a statement to express their disappointment in which they said, “We are very disappointed. This is clearly a Budget that has no space for farmers of this country. The Modi government is yet again communicating to farmers that it is the companies and not the farmers who matter to this government,” reported News18.
It also said that the budget should have addressed the problems of rising peasant debts and to secure remunerative prices from the sale of crops.
The budget announced by the Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman has allocated Rs 2.83 lakh crore to agriculture, irrigation and rural development. The amount has increased from Rs 2.68 lakh crore in 2019-20 fiscal. However, the farmers’ body mentioned that if the impending inflation is taken into consideration, the nominal increase almost amounts to zero.
Further, the budget has raised the Farmer’s credit target to 15 crores. But, the farmers’ body said that most of this credit will be invested in big agri-businesses, to promote the sales of costly inputs and machinery of the companies. There are no structural changes that can ensure that the credits will be used by the small and marginal farmers, tenant farmers and Adivasi farmers. There are no provisions to support the farmers and secure their lands from being mortgaged.
Consequently, the farmers, especially the small and marginal farmers, have been unfairly excluded from the institutional and systemized methods of financing. They have to rely on the unorganized ways of raising credits through debts, that eventually leads to lifelong indebtedness and suicides, the committee added.
