Then Chief Minister of Maharashtra Vilasrao Deshmukh receives Prime Minister Dr Manmohan Singh at Nagpur on June 30, 2006. | B M Meena
It was Maharashtra’s darkest hour. The then Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his cabinet colleagues listened in stunned silence as the widows of Vidarbha described the plight of their families and lamented the total lack of support from the state administration. Dhamangaon in Amravati district was the first stop on the PM’s two-day tour across the killing fields of eastern Maharashtra. That was on June 30 and July 1 of 2006
Manmohan Singh finally spoke at the end of the meeting. “I am aware of the pain and sorrow you have undergone in the last few years,” he said. “I promise you,before I wind up my tour, we will announce a special Central relief package for you,” Singh added, with Union agriculture minister Sharad Pawar nodding in agreement. This scribe had covered the tour that had immensely moved the soft-spoken, self-effacing economist-politician.
Manmohan Singh’s assurance allowed the then chief minister Vilasrao Deshmukh and other functionaries of the Congress-ruled state to breathe easy. For the first-ever Rs 72000 crore farm relief package that followed covering 31 districts across the country, included the six cotton -growing districts of Vidarbha that had acquired the dubious distinction farmers’ suicide epicentre of the country. The package helped the ruling Congress party at the Centre and in the state to repair its battered image and generate a sense of relief among people in the region.
After the interaction, Singh left for a visit to Mahatma Gandhi’s Sewagram ashram and then another meeting at Waifad in Wardha district where he met some more farmers’ families. He later addressed a press conference at Raj Bhavan in Nagpur before returning to Delhi.
In one of the most professional undertakings, under the then Amravati divisional commissioner Sudhir Goyal’s leadership, a door-to-door survey was carried out in May 2006 . Startling facts come out of it. The report was presented to the Prime Minister’s Office in June before Manmohan Singh’s visit to Vidarbha. In the survey of 17.80 lakh people in the six cotton growing districts of Yavatmal, Amravati, Akola, Washim, Buldhana and Wardha, the report had identified four lakh people living in acute distress. It had also pointed out that 12 lakh people were reeling under debt burden. The most shocking finding was that nearly a lakh people were in urgent need of medical help and over three lakh families had marriageable daughters all of which was a financial burden they had no means to meet. Health care and marriages cause a big drain in farmers’ family budgets.
Manmohan Singh as finance minister from 1991 in PV Narasimha Rao government may have changed the economic course of the country with the liberalisation and reforms. “But farmers of Vidarbha reeling under agrarian crisis would always remember him as a saviour who provided the much needed relief,” said Kishore Tiwari, a farmers’ leader. His Vidarbha Jan Andolan Samiti kept a close tab on the then precarious situation in the cotton belt highlighting the need for urgent mitigation.
