Madhya Pradesh chief minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan began 2011 by telling his ministerial colleagues and bureaucrats to focus attention on development but rounded up the year with a scathing attack on the Centre, accusing it of neglecting the maintenance of national highways passing through the state.
The chief minister’s plan to pursue the goal of rapid development got marooned at the outset as the state had come under the grip of an intense cold wave last January. Finding itself pushed to the wall on the issue of rising incidence of suicide by farmers, the Madhya Pradesh government chose to waive recovery of revenue for the year 2011 from all the account-holder farmers, who had lost more than 25 per cent of their rabi crop due to extreme cold wave and frost. The chief minister had also met Prime Minister Manmohan Singh to demand a special relief package of `5000 crores for the farm sector.
The farmers’ crisis had got aggravated by the pressure of loan recovery and false cases of electricity theft booked against a large number of farmers. To express solidarity and demand immediate disbursal of compensation to the affected farmers the then state Congress president Suresh Pachouri also led a farmers’ procession in Bhopal the last week of January 2011. The police used force and even lathicharged the Congress workers. Protesting against this, Mr Pachouri went on an indefinite protest fast, which he broke on February 3 after the Central government had sanctioned `424.60 crores (`200 crores as a special financial package and `224.60 crores as second instalment under the Calamity Relief Fund).
The chief minister had responded to the initiative by the Centre by saying this was not enough and declared that he would be sitting on a fast to seek a better deal.