Prime Minister Narendra Modi yesterday resisted calls for the repeal of farm reforms that have ignited the biggest protests by farmers in years around the national capital, saying they were being misled and that deregulation would benefit them.
Thousands of people from the big farming state of Punjab were camped out on the outskirts of Delhi for a fifth day demanding that they be allowed to stage protests in the city centre against the new laws that open up the country’s tightly regulated farm produce market.
Farmers who could earlier sell grains and other products only at neighbouring government-regulated wholesale markets can now sell them across the country, including to big food processing companies and retailers such as WalMart.
But farm groups and opposition parties say the government will eventually abolish the wholesale markets, where growers were assured of a minimum support price (MSP) for staples like wheat and rice, leaving small farmers at the mercy of corporate agri-businesses.
Speaking at a public rally during a visit to his political constituency of Varanasi, Modi dismissed the fears as misplaced.
“The new agricultural laws have been brought in for benefit of the farmers. We will see and experience benefits of these new laws in the coming days,” he said.
He blamed the opposition for spreading rumours about the future of farmers.
“These forces have spread misinformation to such an extent that it is unbelievable. They did not even allow welfare schemes to be implemented in states where they are in power,” Modi said.
The prime minister said that the old system option was still open for farmers. “These are the same people who have been duping farmers for decades. The MSP was always announced but never implemented. Their mega schemes never reached the beneficiaries,” he said.
The farm sector contributes nearly 15% of India’s $2.9tn economy and employs around half its 1.3bn people.
Modi listed the various schemes announced by his government for farmers including mobile cold storage, micro irrigation and access to a global market.”Black rice from this region now has a market in Australia,” he said. The prime minister said his government had also implemented the pension scheme for farmers and 2.1mn farmers have even been linked to the scheme. He said that farmers could not be blamed because they have suffered for decades and have been fleeced.
The government says the deregulation of the sector will attract investment and fix the supply chains that lose a quarter of the country’s produce to wastage.
But Rahul Gandhi, the leader of the Congress party, said the new laws would benefit big business and accused Modi of crony capitalism.
“Our farmers are standing up against the black laws, they have reached Delhi leaving their farms and families behind. Do you want to stand with them or with Modi’s capitalist friends?” he said in a tweet.
A farmer sits in a tractor trolley during a protest against the newly-passed farm bills at Singhu border near Delhi yesterday.
