VIJAYAWADA: An enraged Chief Minister, YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, criticized the opposition and a media section of the Legislative Assembly on Friday for “spreading lies” and accused the Telugu Desam government of having destroyed cooperative dairies to promote heritage. He objected to TD calling Amul a corporate company.
The chief minister said that the value of Heritage’s shares rose each time TD chairman N. Chandrababu Naidu was in power and declined when he lost, raising suspicions. Showing statistics, he stated that Naidu was sending TD members to the podium to create chaos in the House in order to strangle the voice of the government.
Jagan Mohan Reddy said that Amul is a cooperative society, owned by farmers and ranked eighth among the best in the world. He said, “looking at Heritage’s share price according to the National Stock Exchange (NSE) index since 1999, when Naidu was in power, its share price was” 2.89 on January 1, 1999 and “26.90 on December 12, 2003 and before”. the 2009 elections, when Naidu was not in power, on April 9, 2009, the share price fell to ‘16.35. It increased from 35 to 100 when Kiran Kumar Reddy was Chief Minister. When Naidu returned to power in 2014, the share price rose to a record high of ‘827 in December 2017. Heritage shares fell to’ 205 in March 2020 after Naidu resigned.
The CM claimed that Naidu had killed Chittoor Dairy, which once competed with Heritage, while ordering its closure in 2003. Displaying the orders, Reddy claimed that this is an example of how the cooperative sector was severely affected during the TD.
Reddy said: “When Naidu was Chief Minister, Bank of Baroda and Heritage signed a memorandum of understanding on December 30, 2016 on behalf of easy loans to farmers whereby dairy farmers should sell milk only to Heritage to low price. This is Naidu’s terrible approach and its efforts to deceive farmers. “
The Chief Minister stated that his goal was not Heritage but the empowerment of women. “If the cooperative sector is strong, competition will increase and the income of farmers and our sisters will increase. This will benefit more than 27 lakh sisters in rural areas dedicated to the dairy sector, ”he said.
Jagan Mohan Reddy said that if Amul does not come, most of the bulk milk cooling units will be closed and milk will be collected from only 800 villages. She said her goal was to focus especially on empowering women, improving the socioeconomic status of milk producers, offering a better price for milk and providing quality milk to consumers.
The Chief Minister said that the government has found that milk production is high in 9,899 villages and that was the reason why bulk milk cooling units were being installed in those villages. The establishment of women’s dairy cooperative societies is an integral part of the initiative, he said.
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