In the midst of the farmer's protest against the three central farm laws, Prime Minister Narendra Modi today said that the Centre was trying to empower small farmers, who made up 80 percent of the population.
Speaking at a public meeting in Aligarh district of Uttar Pradesh, Modi claimed that more than 80% of Indian farmers owned land holdings of less than 2 hectares, even as he remarked that the domestic rural population was undergoing a transition.
“The central government is aiming to empower small farmers via various schemes such as increasing the minimum support price (MSP), Kisan Credit Card (KCC), insurance, pension scheme, and so on,” he stated.
The Prime Minister stated that the Centre has made direct disbursements to farmers of Rs.1 trillion, including Rs.25000 crore to farmers in Uttar Pradesh.
Rakesh Tikait, a Jat leader from Western UP, is leading the relentless farm protests. The ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) is concerned about its poll prospects in the aftermath of the upcoming UP elections, which will be conducted in early 2022.
The agitated farmers say that the new farm laws would disempower them and, as a result, the MSP system will be undermined in favour of private purchasers - an allegation that the Centre categorically denies.
Despite this, the BJP government has been taking aggressive steps to appease farmers through social outreach programs and special government schemes.
In this respect, Modi referred to former Prime Minister Chaudhary Charan Singh, the country's tallest Jat leader, as having demonstrated the way to bringing prosperity to the lives of small farmers and laborers so that they could make a decent livelihood.
Meanwhile, the Prime Minister stated that the Centre's plan to increase the ethanol blending ratio will result in increased rural wages, particularly in Uttar Pradesh, in the future years. UP is the largest sugarcane and ethanol (a sugarcane byproduct) producer in the country.
