New Delhi, September 17
Former Punjab Chief Minister Parkash Singh Badal and his associates will be chargesheeted by the end of October on corruption charges, the Punjab Chief Minister, Capt Amarinder Singh, said here today.

“I don’t even remember the names of all people figuring on the Vigilance list. At the moment, I can only recollect former Akali minister Sucha Singh Langah’s name, who will be chargesheeted along with Mr Badal,” the Chief Minister told reporters on the sidelines of a farmers’ protest in the Capital.

Compelling evidence against the Shiromani Akali Dal (SAD) President had been obtained by the Vigilance, he added.

In an unprecedented gesture, the Chief Minister after sitting in the farmers’ dharna, organised by the Bharatiya Kisan Union (BKU), led by Mr Bhupinder Singh Mann, a former MP, said, “The Centre has been discriminating against Punjab, whose farmers produced surplus foodgrains to make the country self-sufficient.”

Virtually relieving himself of the responsibility on the farmers’ front, he said it was the Centre which fixed the MSP for wheat and paddy and the state government was only purchasing the foodgrains on behalf of the Union Government for the Central pool.

He also supported the slogan-shouting farmers, who marched to Parliament, demanding that the MSP for paddy, freezed at Rs 580 a quintal for the current season by the Centre, should be raised to Rs 780 a quintal, otherwise the growers would lose Rs 200 as an input cost on each quintal of produce. Every year, the farmers had to incur 12 to 15 per cent more money on the inputs to the crop, he added. Punjab contributed around 10 million tonnes of rice to the Central pool every year.

Lambasting the NDA government at the Centre, the Chief Minister said that to harass farmers, who had already started bringing their produce to Punjab markets, the FCI had postponed the date for the starting of purchase from the previous norm of September 21 to October 1.

He said the Central Government was not allowing Punjab to sell sugar stocks worth Rs 600 crore lying with it for past two years while sugar from Maharashtra and Uttar Pradesh was being sold in the state and the adjoining Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir.

As the stocks were not being cleared, cooperative sugar mills were not able to pay arrears of Rs 125 crore to farmers, he added.

The Chief Minister said Union Minister Sukhdev Singh Dhindsa had failed to get any fair deal for the farmers from the Centre.

Punjab Finance Minister Lal Singh, who also joined the farmers’ dharna, said the previous Akali-BJP government did not do much for the farmers. Now, the state government had been trying to restructure Rs 1200-crore long-term loans of farmers from land mortgage banks and other institutions on soft terms, besides bailing out sugar cooperative mills with a payment of Rs 600 crore.