By Bizodisha Bureau, Bhubaneswar, November 17, 2015 : The Naveen Patnaik government appears to have been cornered by his party MLAs and MPs to think over coming out with a White Paper on a spate of farmers suicides in the last couple of months in the aftermath of a severe drought in most parts of Odisha.

The ruling Biju Janata Dal government had been dodging the issue of farmers’ suicide saying that it has not relation to crop failure or farm loans.

But the latest salvo fired by senior party MP from Bhubaneswar, Prasanna Patsani justifying the need for the government to come out with a white paper on the cases of farmers’ suicide has further embarrassed the state government.

Before Patsani, MPs from Sambalpur and Puri, Nagendra Pradhan, Pinaki Mishra respectively had made it clear that the farm loan from money lenders largely accounted for farmers’ suicide and made responsible the State government for failing to act in time on the issue.

“In many cases farmers have committed suicide as the moneylenders increased the loan burden by calculating compound interest, and in other case, sharecroppers have ended lives due to some or other reasons. Unfortunately, all the death cases have been linked to crop loss and loan burden. So a white paper on the death cases can only clarify,” the bearded MP told media persons.

Accepting that some death cases are due to crop failure, Patsani stated an inquiry must be done on all the recent death cases reported in various parts of the State.

“There must be an inquiry on deaths of farmers so that the exact reason behind the deaths will come out,” he remarked. noted.

Just a week back, Mishra said he was aware of a case where a peasant took the extreme step as he was unable to repay loan taken from a moneylender.