Hyderabad: Ahead of the Telangana cabinet meeting scheduled on January 4, Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) has demanded that the Congress government fulfill promises it made to the tenant farmers and agricultural workers in the state before the assembly elections.
Addressing the media at Basheerbagh Press Club on Friday, January 3, representatives of various farmers’ unions claimed that the cabinet sub-committee on Rythu Bharosa scheme took the decisions without holding a state-level meeting with farmers’ associations and agricultural worker unions.
The union leaders said that a large number of participants in the district-level meetings held on the issue had opined that tenant farmers also needed to be identified and offered input assistance and that almost everyone had said that a limit needed to be placed on the number of acres and Rythu Bharosa should not be given to land holdings exceeding 5 or 10 acres.
Tenant farmers in Telangana demand recognition and government benefits
“While we welcome the government’s stand that only cultivated lands would get Rythu Bharosa support, how can the government ignore the actual cultivators? The process being proposed by the state government such as taking affidavits from the land owners that they are cultivating the land this season will make the situation even more difficult for the tenant farmers,” said Kiran Vissa, SKM representative.
“Even though the state government is claiming that it has spent a record amount of Rs 54,000 crore towards farmers in its first year, not even 1% has gone to the tenant cultivators who constitute 36% of Telangana’s farmers,” he noted.
Reminding that the leader of the opposition in Lok Sabha Rahul Gandhi had also met tenant farmers during his Bharat Jodo Yatra, where he had promised that they would be included in all the government schemes, the SKM leaders cited chief minister A Revanth Reddy’s open letter to tenant farmers dated September 13, 2023, where he had mentioned that there were 22 lakh tenant farmers cultivating 40% of the land, but the BRS government had completely ignored them.
They demanded that the promised payment of Rs 12,000 per year should be given to all agricultural workers as well.
