Former Chief of Army Staff General VK Singh (retd) today raised serious questions on the security aspects, acquisition of fertile land of farmers and the logic of setting up a nuclear power plant at Gorakhpur in Fatehabad. The former Army Chief, who visited farmers sitting on dharna near the land, was speaking to mediapersons here today. “Uprooting hundreds of farmers from their highly fertile lands for installing a nuclear power plant in a densely populated area hardly 130 km from our international border with Pakistan is not a wise decision,” General VK Singh (retd)said. “Does the Haryana government want to drive the country back to the sixties, when India faced a severe food crisis, by acquiring fertile lands of farmers for development projects whose very logic is questionable?,” the former Army Chief asked. He said he had come here to support the poor farmers, who, he alleged, were being exploited in the name of development. He said if the state government succeeded in its plans, then not only would these nearly 1,000 farmers be displaced, but also hundreds of others who are dependent on these lands would be rendered jobless. MG Devasahaayam, a former bureaucrat from Haryana, said he was confident that the present power deficit in the state could be met by managing transmission and distribution properly. TMC relief for 3 dead farmers’ kin The All-India Trinamool Congress (AITMC) today delivered relief of Rs 2 lakh each to the families of three farmers--- Bhagu Ram, Ishwar Singh and Ram Kumar-- who had died during the farmers’ agitation against the acquisition of land for the proposed Gorakhpur nuclear power plant.