HYDERABAD: IT and Industries Minister KT Rama Rao has announced that the Rs 4 per litre incentive to dairy farmers, which has been pending, will be disbursed into their accounts soon. Addressing a gathering after inaugurating Vijaya Dairy’s plant constructed across 40 acres at Raviryal village of Maheshwaram mandal in Ranga Reddy district on Thursday, he said that Chief Minister K Chandrashekar Rao was the only one in the country to have disbursed Rs 350 crore as an incentive to dairy farmers.
He took potshots at Prime Minister Narendra Modi on his claims of doubling the farmers’ incomes by 2022. He said that farmers’ incomes could only be doubled if green, white, blue, pink and yellow revolutions could be achieved and all these five sectors allied with agriculture progressed well, the way being done in Telangana.“Only with proper action can farmers’ income be doubled, and not by making tall speeches,” he said.
Observing that except for Telangana, farmers have been suffering in all other states due to a lack of irrigation, investment and power supply, he said that while the Centre has been liquidating the public sector undertakings (PSU), the State government has been working to save PSUs, which could be seen the way Vijaya Dairy has been pulled out of bankruptcy by the State government, to a stage where it has now been giving dividends to the State government. In a lighter vein, he wondered why the dairy farmers who have been demanding the State government to clear the arrears of Rs 4 per litre incentive due to them, never questioned previous governments which he believed, had done nothing to develop the dairy sector.
“We have disbursed Rs 73,000 crore Rythu Bandhu assistance to farmers despite the Covid-19 pandemic and supplied free and uninterrupted power to the farmers,” he pointed out.
He assured that in the future the storage and processing capacity of Vijaya Dairy will further be expanded. Meanwhile, Animal Husbandry Minister T Srinivas Yadav said that it was because of Rs 4 per litre incentive that Vijaya Dairy’s milk collection has increased from 1,37,000 litres in 2014 to 4 lakh litres presently, and the number of members in the Telangana State Dairy Development Cooperative Federation Ltd has gone from 30,000 members in 2014, to 1.5 lakh members now.