All India Kisan Sangarsh Coordination Committee calls Union Budget 2018 Anti-Farmers Budget as they have not fulfilled the promises that they made to farmers and did a big fraud with them by making a false promise of providing a 50% profit over the input cost for agricultural commodities.

In support of this statement V.M Singh said “Finance Minister played a dirty game with farmers and has come up with new definition of MSP which is exactly same as the old MSP.

He further said that previous year farmer budget for the whole year was 2.38% but this year they have decreased it further, and reduced it to 2.36%. There is no allocation of extra payment for C2 (comprehensive cost of production).

VM Singh said “We want right price for our production”.

AIKSC committee member in his addressing speech said “this budget has contracted the expenditure part on agriculture side and disinvest the private sector only to appease the international finance at the expense of common people and called BJP government as Gimmicks”.

The AIKSCC leaders said the BJP had forgotten its poll promise of 1.5 times return of the input cost since it had come to power. However, it was left with no option but to declare it during this budget under the pressure of Farmers Protest.

Slamming the government for playing with the input cost figures while fixing the MSP, Yogendra Yadav of Swaraj Abhiyan said the new MSP rates using A2+FL as input cost would hurt farmers.

Comprehensive cost of production “C2” as demanded by Kisan Andolan and which Swaminathan Committee has also recommended and as the BJP promised,  has now shifted their goal post from C2 to A2+FL a partial cost which is already given at the time of Congress regime on the ground that C2 will leads to market distortion.

Calling it a big Fraud Yogendra Yadav further commented that the crux of this entire strategy of not giving what we have demanded is that “Rs 33279 crores would have been the additional budgetary allocation if they had introduced C2+50%”.

He said the problem with C2+50% is not of market distortion but of Pocket Distortion.

Other panelist of AIKSCC said the amount of 1200crores which has been allocated for e-trading especially for farmers will only support big firms not farmers. (KNN/YV)