BENGALURU: Three senior IAS officers, including Chief Secretary Kaushik Mukherjee could face charges of contempt of court, for allegedly not complying with the Karnataka High Court’s order in connection with the fixing of Minimum Support Price (MSP) for paddy in accordance with the recommendations of the Karnataka Agriculture Price Commission.
Davanagere District Farmers’ Associations’ Federation convener Balluru Ravikumar told Express, “We have decided to proceed with the contempt of court petition against the senior IAS officers for not following the recent High Court directions on the issue.”
Kalpana Gopalan, Principal Secretary to the Department of Food and Civil Supplies and Manjunath Prasad, Secretary, Department of Agriculture, are the other two senior officials who may face contempt charges.
Stating that the Farmers’ Federation had given three days additional time to the three officials to comply with the High Court order, Ravikumar said, “The attitude of the officers is causing huge financial losses to the farming community.”
Outlining the issue, he said the Agriculture Price Commission had recently recommended a minimum support price of Rs1,740 to Rs1,800 per quintal of paddy plus 20 per cent towards labour cost, which the federation wants the government to implement.
“Ignoring our pleas, the government, in its Cabinet meeting held recently, fixed the MSP for paddy at Rs1,410 per quintal, which is far below the price recommended by the Commission, and lesser than what was fixed in 2013-14. The attitude of the government is obnoxious,” he said.
“While disposing of a writ petition filed by the farmers’ organisation in October, the High Court had directed the government to take a decision on the recommendations of the Price Commission, which was however thrown to winds,” said Ravikumar.
Official sources said the officials concerned, while preventing the state government from accepting the Agriculture Price Commission’s recommendations, had informed the government about a circular issued by the Union government cautioning against fixing MSP over and above the States Advisory Price (SAP) fixed by the Union Ministry of Agriculture.
The Union government had also threatened that it would not spare its godowns to store the paddy which may be bought by state governments at a price higher than recommended by it.