Maya didn’t help out sugarcane farmers: Rajnath

‘‘Had she tried harder, she could have managed to get a rate of Rs 95-100 per quintal,’’ said Singh refusing to elaborate on how exactly she could have done that. His basis of saying this was that he himself had got the rate when he was chief minister.

Singh said today a formula will soon be finalised to provide assistance to the cane farmers. ‘‘The package will be worked out and announced by the Centre, even though the issue falls under the domain of the state government,’’ he said to farmers’ representatives from Baghpat, Shamli, Muzaffarnagar, Bareilly and Saharanpur

There are 101 mills in UP, out of which 51 are private and the rest are cooperatives. While the cooperative mills are paying Rs 95 per quintal which is the State Administered Price (SAP), the private mill owners are paying Rs 82-87 per quintal. Though this is the end of the season , the farmers are hopeful that they might get a better price.

After the meeting, it was the farmers who summed up the situation: ‘‘Our only hope was Ajit Singh because we were his votebank, BJP is not interested in us and we clearly do not vote for Mayawati, so why should she do something for us?’’ said one leader.

Inspite of repeated efforts, the mills have stuck to the stand of not paying the SAP that is higher than the Statutory Minimum Price and have gone to the Supreme Court getting orders that flout the release-control mechanism to check the amount of sugar released from the mills.

As the sugarcane crisis has unfolded, there have been three main players — Mayawati who fixed the state administered price but has not enforced it, Sharad Yadav, Food Minister who is incharge of matters pertaining to sugarcane and Ajit Singh, former Agriculture Minister who was interested in a solution as farmers of Western UP constitute his votebank.