CHANDIGARH: Punjab cooperation minister Harpal Singh Cheema said in the state assembly on Saturday that cooperative sugar mills in the state have to pay Rs 313 crore to sugarcane farmers and private sugar mills owe them Rs 257 crore.
During question hour on the second day of the budget session, Cheema assured the House that the state government was making all efforts to ensure that all the sugar mills make timely payment to the cane growers. He emphasised that the state government would attach the properties of the private sugar mills if they fail to pay the farmers in time. Cheema accused the earlier governments in the state of protecting the private sugar mills and said that the Aam Aadmi Party(AAP) government was also following the legal process in case of the private sugar mill at Phagwara for recovery of farmers' money.
To this, leader of opposition Partap Singh Bajwa of the Congress informed the House that even a private sugar mill in chief minister Bhagwant Mann's assembly constituency Dhuri has crores of outstanding payment and farmers have been forced to wait long.
When former deputy chief minister Sukhjinder Singh Randhawa, who earlier headed the cooperative department, stood and asked the finance minister to tell the House as to how much payment of cooperative sugar mills was pending for the financial year 2018-19, 2019-20 and 2020-21, speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan said this had to be asked separately. Randhawa informed the House that there is no outstanding payment to farmers for these three years and it was the Congress government which had started attaching properties of Phagwara sugar mill. Morinda cooperative sugar mill owe Rs 34.16 crore to sugarcane growers.
