Potato farmers’ suicides in Bengal not due to debts, but there has been a bumper crop and there is shortage of storage

#potatofarmers #farmerssuicide #trinamoolcongress It is strange how a minister of West Bengal talks and tries to suppress the true picture. Agricultural Minister Purnendu Basu has informed reporters on the sidelines of an event organized by the MCC Chamber of Commerce in Kolkata that suicide of potato farmers have no link to potatoes.
This has been reported in business-standard.com dated 19 March 2015.

He has agreed that there has been a bumper crop this year and, as a result, the farmers have allegedly not been getting proper remunerative prices. Reports indicate that this situation has led to a number of debt-stressed farmers to take their lives.
In the opinion of the minister of Trinamool Congress, the deaths were due to family issues and not due to debts.
He went on to say that those who the measures taken by the state government will not solve the problem immediately because it takes time to translate into an action...the government had taken steps as soon as it realized the problem.
One has to presume that such a state of affairs has happened all of a sudden and taken the administration by surprise.
As per statistics of the state agricultural department, the production of potatoes in the state has been to the tune of 1.20 crore tonne against the demand of 74 lakh tonne while West Bengal's cold storage chain can store only 65 lakh tonne. Obviously, a peculiar situation.
It is beyond comprehension why the farmers were not advised in advance that over production would lead to problems and they should have gone in for alternate crops. The agricultural minister should have had his ears to the ground and provided necessary guidance to the farmers.

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