Chandigarh, Feb. 3 -- Haryana Congress leader Bhupinder Singh Hooda on Tuesday accused the BJP government of cheating farmers by "reducing" the weight of urea bags while keeping the price the same. Expressing anger over what he claimed was "continuous exploitation of farmers", he said: "The Central and state governments are adopting new tactics to cheat farmers, and a new formula has been introduced by reducing the weight of urea bags."

Hooda, who is the Leader of the Opposition in Haryana, said a bag of urea fertiliser weighed 50 kg earlier. "Then its weight was reduced to 45 kg, and now it has been reduced to just 40 kg. The new bag is claimed to contain 37 per cent nitrogen and 17 per cent sulfur, but the price remains the same at Rs 254.

"This means the name is the same, the price is the same, but farmers are getting less quantity every year," the former Haryana chief minister alleged in a statement. He further alleged that the BJP government was continuously working to break the backs of farmers, and its intentions were clearly visible in the recent Union Budget.

Published by HT Digital Content Services with permission from Millennium Post.