Chandigarh: Senior leader of Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) and Sangrur Member of Parliament (MP) Bhagwant Mann, has said that the government should come out of its supine pastures and implement the recommendations of the Swaminathan Commission and help ameliorating the lot of the distressed farming community in the state.
In a statement issued from the party head quarters in Chandigarh here on Tuesday, Mann said Punjab was an agrarian state where more than 60 per cent of the population was dependent on agriculture and that Punjab had been playing a crucial role in this regard. He alleged that neither the erstwhile SAD-BJP government nor the ruling Congress government in the state had kept their poll promises on loan waiver. Even the Captain Government, which had promised total loan waiver had failed to redeem the promise even after completing almost two years in power, leaving the debt-ridden farmers and farm laborers to commit suicides.
Sangrur MP further said that the Modi government at the centre had wrested power in 2014 Lok Sabha polls by giving false hopes of a loan waiver and making other tall promises they had made to the people. The government had miserably failed to live up to the promises, Mann further said. He lamented that even the Captain government in the state had backtracked on the promises as no people-centric decisions were taken by his government.
He said that the government needed to take a cue from the Delhi state government, led by Arvind Kejriwal, which had set the stage for the implementation of the Swaminathan report in letter and in spirit, once it gets a go-ahead from the expert committee.
Mann said that Amarinder Singh Government should, instead of pinning hopes on Modi government at the centre, take steps and work out modalities to implement the Swaminathan report to salvage the distressed farmers and farm labourers in the state from the vicious debt trap wreaking havoc on their lives.