BANGALORE: The tripartite meeting between the government, sugar factory owners and farmers organisations on Tuesday ended in a fiasco with the government claiming to have resolved the deadlock and farmers disputing it. While Chief Minister D V Sadananda Gowda said that the government intends to bring in a comprehensive sugar policy based on the S A Patil report shortly to deal with the recurring problems of fixing prices, the farmers, criticised the government of being oblivious to the problems of sugarcane growers.
The CM further announced that an all-party delegation will call on the Union ministers to take steps for export of sugar in order to enable farmers to get better prices.
While Gowda claimed that a majority of the farmers from the three organisations settled at providing Rs 1,800 per tonne of sugarcane, excluding harvesting and transport costs that comes to Rs 2,200 per tonne, farmer organisations leaders — Kodihalli Chandrashekar, Kurubur Shanthakumar and K S Puttannaiah — disagreed and asserted that the meeting failed due to the lack of concern on the part of the government.