Jagan lambasts Naidu for destroying cooperative dairies

VIJAYAWADA: An enraged Chief Minister Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy on Friday slammed the Opposition and a section of the media in the Legislative Assembly for “spreading lies” and charged that the Telugu Desam government had destroyed cooperative dairies in order to promote Heritage. He took exception to the TD terming Amul as a corporate company.

The Chief Minister said that the share value of Heritage increased whenever TD president N. Chandrababu Naidu was in power and dropped when he lost, giving rise to suspicion. Showing statistics, he stated that Naidu was sending TD members to the podium to create chaos in the House in order to throttle the voice of the government.

Jagan Mohan Reddy said Amul is a co-operative society, whose owners were farmers and it was ranked eighth best in the world. He said, “looking at Heritage 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 `827 by December 2017. Heritage shares fell to `205 by March 2020 after Naidu stepped down.”

The CM stated that Naidu had killed Chittoor Dairy, which once competed with Heritage, while ordering its closure in 2003. Showing the orders, Reddy stated that this is an example of how the cooperative sector was badly affected during the TD regime.

Reddy said, “When Naidu was Chief Minister, Bank of Baroda and Heritage signed a MoU on 30.12.2016 in the name of easy loans to farmers under which milk farmers should sell milk only to Heritage for low price. This is the terrible approach of Naidu and his efforts to cheat farmers.”

The Chief Minister affirmed that their target was not Heritage but to empower women. “If the cooperative sector is strong, competition will increase and the income of farmers and our sisters will increase. This will benefit over 27 lakh sisters in rural areas engaged in the milk sector,” he said.

Jagan Mohan Reddy said that if Amul does not come, a majority of bulk milk cooling units would be closed and milk will be collected from only 800 villages. He said that special focus on women's empowerment, socio-economic uplift of milk producers, providing better milk price and providing quality milk to consumers was their endeavour.

The Chief Minister said that the government has found that milk production is high in 9,899 villages and that was the reason bulk milk cooling units were being set up in those villages. Establishing women's dairy co-operative societies are integral to the initiative, he pointed out.