Cong to redouble efforts to improve farmers' lot

Hyderabad, Apr 30 (UNI) In keeping with the ''pro-peasant'' image gained in the last two years, the Congress Governnment will redouble its efforts to improve the lot of farmers, Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Y S Rajasekhara Reddy asserted today.

Even the TDP, which had allegedly neglected the farm sector and dubbed farming as a mere waste when it was in power, was of late trying to make amends, he opined while taking part in a seminar organised by the Pradesh Congress Farmers Cell here.

The TDP had ''ignored'' the extension of farm research to farmers' fields by not filling the posts of Agricultural officers, he alleged.

During the previous NDA regime at the Centre, the ''feel good'' factor was restricted only to the affluent sections, leaving out vast sections of the people in the rural areas, he contended.

Thanking the Congress-led Government at the Centre for bringing down the interest rate on loans to farmers to seven per cent, he described the UPA Government's decision to double credit to the farm sector in three years, as historic.'' There was a seven-fold rise in the channelising of capital input to the farm sector,'' he noted.

''Over 18 lakh tenant farmers, for whom institutional credit was unimaginable earlier, got access to credit from banks after forming themselves into groups,'' he added.

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