Now Reading: Elderly farmer touches PACS staffer’s feet for urea in Medak
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Elderly farmer touches PACS staffer’s feet for urea in Medak
Boyini Ramulu (62), a paddy farmer from Chitkul in Telangana's Medak district, touched the feet of a Primary Agriculture Society (PACS) staffer at Rangampet on Wednesday, begging for two bags of urea.…
The Story in Brief
Boyini Ramulu (62), a paddy farmer from Chitkul in Telangana's Medak district, touched the feet of a Primary Agriculture Society (PACS) staffer at Rangampet on Wednesday, begging for two bags of urea. He could not book the fertiliser online because he does not own a smartphone and no one in his family is educated enough to use the mobile app. He even offered to pay Rs 900 per bag, three times the maximum retail price of about Rs 300, but the video of his plea went viral.
Other farmers in the erstwhile Medak district staged a rasta-roko at Polampally on the same day, demanding that the Congress government scrap the online booking system and sell urea manually. Traffic was blocked for over an hour until police assured them the issue would be raised with senior officials. The incident has exposed the gap between digital initiatives and the ground reality for India's most vulnerable cultivators.
The Indian Opinion
Phone-based urea booking may be efficient for some, but it leaves behind lakhs of small and illiterate farmers. The viral video of a 62-year-old man touching a clerk's feet is not just an isolated tragedy, it is a daily reality in rural Telangana. The state must immediately offer a manual or voice-based alternative at every PACS. The real question: will the government audit how many farmers without smartphones were able to buy fertiliser this kharif season?
Source: telanganatoday.com
This story was synthesised by AI from the source linked above.
