By IANS,
Lucknow : Meerut’s sugarcane farmers say they will stop supplies to Bajaj Hindustan Ltd. at Kinauni in the next crushing season.
The threat comes after the mill management Wednesday cleared their dues for the 2007-08 crushing season following a Supreme Court directive. Agitating farmers said dues of the previous 2006-07 season still remained unpaid.
“We will enforce this ban in the next sugarcane crushing season later this year,” leader of the local farmers cooperative society Pritam Singh told IANS by telephone from Kinauni, about 450 km from here.
Singh, who has been spearheading the four-day-old siege to the sugar mill in Kinauni, said it was the “only way we can save farmers from getting exploited at the hands of Bajaj Hindustan”.
“We will have to continue our siege in Kinauni until our dues for the previous year were also cleared,” Singh declared.
District cane officer B.B. Singh said, “A cheque for Rs.10 crore was handed over to the farmers’ cooperative society, after which farmers lifted their sit-in demonstration outside the company’s corporate office in Noida Wednesday.”
“I hope good sense will prevail and the mill owners will abide by the Supreme Court orders to pay up the pending dues for the 2006-2007 crushing as well,” the official said.
Farmers’ leader Pritam Singh said “exploitation” begins as soon as a sugarcane grower hands over his produce to the mill authorities. What follows is a series of litigation by Bajaj Hindustan which engages lawyers to fight farmers in court, he said.
“We will ask the state government to attach the 40,000 farmers of this belt to some other mill instead of Bajaj Hindustan,” Singh said. “We will be happy to get reverted to the Daurala sugar mill where we were attached until three years ago before Bajaj set up its unit here,” Pritam Singh said. Under the state laws, sugarcane growers are required to sell their yield to designated sugar mills.