Harish Rao flays State, Centre on urea scarcity

HYDERABAD

Senior leader of the Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) and former minister T. Harish Rao has alleged that the ruling parties in the State and at the Centre, Congress and Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) respectively, are enacting a high-octane drama on the urea crisis and washing off hands by making contradictory statements.

In a statement, Mr. Rao said on Saturday that both the Congress and BJP are focusing more on claiming that they had nothing to do with the crisis and there was no fault of theirs in the scarcity of the soil nutrient, instead of finding out ways to address the problem and ensure that the farming community gets fertilizer in time to get good yields.

Keeping aside their responsibility, the two governments are enacting a drama blaming each other, while the farming community is being made to wait in serpentine queues for long hours and pleading with officials to issue even one bag of the fertilizer. While the Centre is claiming that there is no urea scarcity or shortage in the country, Chief Minister A. Revanth Reddy is stating that the Centre is not supplying the allotted quantity of urea to the State.

The Centre is claiming that against the requirement of 143 lakh tonnes of urea for the season, 183 lakh tonnes was available, and of it 155 lakh tonnes was already sold. Similarly, 49 lakh tonnes of DAP and 97 lakh tonnes of NPK were kept available against the requirement of 45 lakh tonnes and 58 lakh tonnes, respectively.

In case the statistics being reeled out by the Centre are correct, the blame should go to the State government for its failure in timely supply of urea to farmers. He demanded that the State and Central governments stop betraying farmers and ensure timely supply of urea.