Andhra Pradesh Congress Committee (APCC) president S. Sailajanath has urged President Ram Nath Kovind to repeal the Farmers Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance Farm Service Act, 2020 and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, calling them the ‘three black laws’.
The Congress leaders took out a rally from the Andhra Ratna Bhavan to Raj Bhavan on Tuesday and submitted a memorandum addressed to the President, to Governor Biswa Bhusan Harichandan.
Sharing the contents of the memorandum with the Governor, the APCC president said that around 62 crore farmers, agricultural labourers and 250 farm organisations have been staging demonstrations across the country, opposing the ‘draconian laws’.
“The NDA government had subverted the country’s federal structure, subjugated the constitutional mandate and suppressed the Parliamentary procedure to pass the Bills without any discussion or prior consultation. Even a division of votes was not allowed in the Rajya Sabha and the Bills were passed using force by deploying marshals and by evacuating the Members of Parliament,” said Mr. Sailajanath.
He warned that the new laws would destroy the system of procuring agricultural produce. “The farmers will neither get the Minimum Support Price (MSP) nor the price prevailing in the market for their produce,” he said.
“If the farm produce, instead of being sold in the market, is purchased by crony capitalists at his field itself, how will the farmers get the MSP? They will lose the power of price determination,” he said and argued that the NDA government’s claim that farmers could sell their produce anywhere in the country was a lie.
Abolition of mandis, he said, would snatch away the livelihood of millions of farm labourers, commission agents, munims, loaders, transporters and sellers among others, adding that the scrapping of Grain-Vegetable Market System will result in drying up of the sources of income for the States.
Mr. Sailajanath further said that agricultural experts were of the view that the new laws would reduce farmers to mere labourers in their own lands by getting him entangled in the contract system.
Calling the government move ‘a direct attack on the federal structure of the country’, the APCC president said there was neither protection to the rights of the farm labourers nor to other persons engaged in processing of the produce.
