BRS flays govt. for booking cases against farmers of Jurala ayacut

The Bharat Rashtra Samithi (BRS) has lambasted the State government for filing charges against farmers who sought permission to release water from the Jurala project to protect their standing crops, claiming that irrigation engineers filed the complaints at the request of ruling party leaders. T. Harish Rao, BRS Deputy Floor Leader in the Assembly, stated on Thursday that it has become a customary practice for the Revanth Reddy government to file charges against farmers and transport them to police stations, handcuffed.

He attributed the farmers' inability to obtain water for irrigation to safeguard their crops to the government's failure. Rao alleged that the government had deliberately withheld water release when the Krishna River was flooding to wrongfully benefit farmers in Andhra Pradesh. Instead of addressing their grievances, the government was filing charges against farmers protesting against power outages and requesting water to save their crops.

He urged the government to withdraw the charges immediately against the farmers. Former Minister S. Niranjan Reddy said that the farmers only raised the gates of Jurala last month to save their crops, which were wilting. The government arrested 14 farmers for the offense of attempting to save their standing crop. He alleged that a delegation of ministers and Congress legislators traveled to Karnataka for two days, using public funds to request water release from Almatti-Narayanpur, but only managed to get none.