Demanding higher rates, farmers dump potatoes outside Yogi’s house
LUCKNOW: The roads leading to the Uttar Pradesh assembly and the chief minister’s home in Lucknow were littered with rotten potatoes on Saturday morning as farmers dumped quintals of the tuber for failing to get adequate price for their produce.
The Yogi Adityanath government had fixed ₹487 a quintal as the minimum support price for potato but farmers are demanding ₹10 a kg, which amounts to ₹1,000 a quintal. CM Yogi Adityanath promised to look into their grievances, saying a group of ministers could be formed to resolve farm problems.
He accused his predecessors — the Samajwadi Party and Bahujan Samaj Party — of ignoring farm issues and said farmers’ welfare was his government’s priority. Don’t fall into a trap laid by unscrupulous politicians, he advised a crowd of farmers in Meerut district, where he inauguconstables rated the Mohiuddinpur Sugar Mill. Reacting to the protest, Samajwadi Party national secretary Rajendra Chaudhary said potato farmers in the state “are not even getting ₹2 a kg and are forced to dump the produce on roads”.
Unidentified farmers sneaked into the high-security area on Vidhan Sabha Marg and Kalidas Marg to unload hundreds of kilos of potatoes. The two stretches looked extremely dirty after the potatoes got squished under the wheels of vehicles on Saturday morning.
Lucknow senior superintendent of police Deepak Kumar said the vehicles of the farmers, who were involved in throwing potatoes, had been identified. He also ordered the suspension of four and a sub-inspector.
The potatoes, however, gave poor people something to cheer about. They thronged the area in the morning, picked as many potatoes as they could and feasted on them over bonfires the administration had set up for the destitute to protect them from the cold.
Sanitation workers, though, had a tough time cleaning the roads. Such farm protests aren’t new to Lucknow. Hundreds of sugarcane farmers burnt their crop outside the Vidhan Sabha last October, though that was an organised protest by the Bharatiya Kisan Union. They were angry over the ₹10 hike in Minimum Support Price offered by the government, which they said was too low for their produce. In August last year, Congress workers opened stalls selling tomatoes at a concessional rate to protest against the rise in price of the vegetable. The party sold petrol at a discounted rate a month later in protest against hike in fuel price.