PATIALA, 12 APRIL
Member Parliament from Patiala and Former External affairs minister Preneet Kaur wrote a letter to Union Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar urging him to provide compensation to farmers for the loss of yeild due to extreme heat wave in Punjab.
In her letter to the minister she pointed out that “Due to the lack of rain, the heat has broken the record of many years, which has inadvertently affected the wheat crop. The Wheat yield has this year declined by 25 per cent with an estimated loss of about 5-7 Quintal of wheat per acre to every farmer. ”
The Patiala MP further said that, “Earlier, an acre yielded 20 to 22 quintals, but this time due to extreme heat, the yield of wheat is only 15 to 17 quintals. Due to this farmers are suffering huge losses and computing that in monetary terms the loss comes to about Rs. 10-15 thousand per acre per farmer.”
She urged the union minister of agriculture, “To provide monetary compensation to these farmers to meet their losses as farming is their sole livelihood and a large number of Punjab’s population is dependent on agriculture.”
