Stating that there was nothing new in the Finance Minister Arun Jaitley’s budget speech, the Telangana Pradesh Congress Committee (TPCC) deplored that the Union budget had miserably failed to address the concerns of farmers. Describing the budget as “anti-people, anti-farmer,” he said that it is shocking not a single new scheme was announced to help farmers.

TPCC president N Uttam Kumar Reddy said that the Finance Minister only listed out various schemes, which were launched earlier and made references, which were primarily advisory in nature, he said, adding that merely fixing target for Agricultural Credit at Rs 10 lakh crore does not help the farmers.

For instance, he said banks could not reach even 60 per cent of the target set for Yasangi, and in Telangana alone, as against the target of Rs 13,000 crore, crop loans of just Rs 7,500 crore were disbursed among farmers.

Stating that farmers were badly hit by the demonetisation decision, he felt that the Centre should have come up with a crop loan waiver scheme. Further, the Budget failed to give an assurance to farmers on hike in Minimum Support Price for their produce or assured effective procurement of agricultural products.

Moreover, Reddy felt that the budget failed to provide any healing touch to the demonetisaiton-hit economy. “It offers no compensation to either farmers, small and medium traders and businessman or even those who lost their livelihood since November 8, 2016”, he observed.

Though states like Telangana were worst-hit, he wondered no specific reference was made on how such States would be compensated for the losses they incurred due to Centre’s ill-conceived note ban decision.

He expressed concern that there was nothing in the Budget for Telangana State, and none of the assurances given to Telangana under the AP Reorganisation Act at the time of bifurcation were fulfilled and the new State would not get any substantial funds during the year 2017-18.