Manipur chief minister Nongthombam Biren Singh said that the Central farm laws are in larger interest of the farmers of our country and the State government is strongly in support of the bills.
Emphatically stating BJP-led coalition government’s stance on the farm laws through a Facebook post on Thursday, Biren said, “The BJP led government has always stood with the farmers and the bill would transform the agriculture sector, doubling the farmers’ income by 2022. It will also fetch farmers a better price for their produce.”
Three farm laws, namely the Farmer’s Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act 2020, The Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020 and The Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act, 2020, were passed in the Parliament in September this year.
Several farmer bodies, especially from Punjab and Haryana claim the laws will negatively impact their livelihoods and are opposing them tooth and nail through protests. The talks with the protesting farmer bodies have not yielded any positive result for the Centre yet.
Claiming that the BJP-led government in the state was trying to remove middlemen from farmers’ transactions, Biren uploaded a video on his official FB page, which also said, “Now there will be no agent. There will be no commission, no middle men, directly the farmers can order and directly the farmers can purchase.”
On the raging controversy over the status of minimum support price (MSP) regime, Biren said Prime Minister Narendra Modi had categorically and repeatedly given the assurance that there will be no change in the MSP.
Apart from this, Union home minister Amit Shah has also committed that MSP will not be changed or touched, he said, before adding,” Fortunately, farmers of Manipur are in support of the Farm Bills.”
He opined that any rollback in reforms and development by the government would turn out to be support for vested interests, which, in future, would hinder other reforms.
