Madhya Pradesh Chief Minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan on Saturday strongly hit out at Congress General Secretary Priyanka Vadra Gandhi in Bhopal after she said that farmers in the state were not able to even make Rs 27 per day. Chouhan said growers in the state are getting the payment of Rs 12,000, without specifying if farmers were getting the money in their accounts on a monthly or yearly basis. Speaking to reporters, he said the Congress leader should not tell a lie which is hard to digest.
“I would like to say that Rs 6,000 from the prime minister and Rs 6,000 from me are being directly deposited into the bank accounts of farmers. Don’t tell such a lie that it can’t be stomached,” he remarked, as quoted by news agency PTI.
The Chief Minister also claimed that farmers got loans at an 18 per cent interest rate during the previous Congress rule, adding that his government is giving them loans at zero per cent. These comments came after Priyanka Gandhi said that the daily income of a farmer was just Rs 27 a day.
Addressing a ‘Jan Aakrosh’ rally in Gwalior on Friday, Gandhi said that the Centre was handing over the country’s wealth to two businessmen. However, without naming anyone, she said one of them was earning Rs 1,600 crore per day, while a farmer was unable to make Rs 27 per day, reported PTI.
Speaking during the rally earlier, she said that the abandoned farm loan waiver scheme would be restarted if her party is voted to power in MP, which is going to witness the assembly elections by the year-end.
Meanwhile, ahead of the last Assembly polls in 2018, the Congress had promised to waive farm loans of up to Rs 2 lakh. The loan waiver scheme was believed to be one of the significant factors behind its victory. Although the victory was with a slender margin over the BJP. The Congress says it wrote-off the loans of lakhs of farmers in the state but the BJP discontinued the relief after coming to power.