Calcutta HC seeks report on state's potato farmers

Kolkata, March 13 (IANS) In the wake of the suicide of two potato growers in West Bengal, the Calcutta High Court, hearing a PIL on the subject on Friday, directed the Mamata Banerjee government to submit a report about the steps taken to alleviate the farmers' plight.

The order by the bench of Chief Justice Manjula Chellur came while hearing a public interest litigation that was filed in 2012.

"We had filed the PIL in 2012 after 79 potato farmers committed suicide in West Bengal during 2011-12. With two new cases of such suicides this month, we made a fresh application drawing the court's attention to the plight of the farmers who are in dire straits, unable to even recover the cost of production," said Ravi Shankar Chatterjee, counsel for the petitioner.

"On our plea to fix minimum support price as well as to ensure such a scenario is not repeated, the court today directed the state government to file a report within seven days about the steps taken by it in this regard," he said.

A potato grower in Burdwan district and another in Hooghly district committed suicide earlier this week with their families saying they had taken the extreme step anticipating that they would not be able to repay loans due to poor potato prices this year.

The state government, however, has attributed personal reasons behind the farmers taking their own lives.

"Reports of suicide by potato farmers as reported in a section of media are not true. Reasons of those deaths are entirely different from what had been reported," state Agriculture Minister Purnendu Bose had said on Thursday.