All sights of beauty are not joy forever, hundreds of nursery owners at Purbasthali in East Burdwan have realised it the hard way.

On acres and acres of land, flowers have blossomed but what the nursery growers are starring at are losses running into lakhs of rupees and all because of the fear over the citizenship matrix and the ongoing nationwide protests.

The scare over the National Register of Citizens and the Citizenship (Amendment) Act and the protests have hit the flow of customers from states such as Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Assam and Jharkhand.

The customers come over to Purbasthali to buy flower plants.

Sources have said Purbasthali has around 160 large nurseries that supply saplings, mainly of several varieties of flowers, across Bengal, neighbouring states and Uttar Pradesh.

The farmers said they grew in winter saplings of a variety of winter flowers, including rose, marigold and Dahlia. The customers from other states take away truckloads of flower plants.

“Our peak business season begins in the middle of December and ends in January. The protests against the CAA and the NRC have forced our customers to stay back at their native places. This has led to a fall in demand. As most of the customers belong to the minority community, they told us over phone that they were busy finding documents that could be required as proof of citizenship,” said Mahadeb Dutta, a nursery owner at Purbasthali’s Palashfuli. Dutta’s nursery is spread over three acres.

The cultivators said when they had called up their customers to know when they would come to pick up consignments, they learnt that the citizenship matrix had left them too busy to have time for gardening.

“We also sympathise with the worry of the people over the CAA. But the panic has hurt our business adversely. Last year, I had made a profit of Rs 2 lakh, but this year, I am running a loss of Rs 20,000. We have been ruined,” said another nursery owner.

After the CAA was passed in Parliament in December, protests broke out in various states, including Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Assam. Road and rail services came to a halt because of the protests. At least 25 people were killed, mostly in Uttar Pradesh, for protesting against the Narendra Modi government’s decision to implement the CAA.

A leader of the nursery owners’ association — Purbasthali Nursery Byabasayee Kalyan Samity — said many of them couldn’t pay wages to their workers.

“You can see all around here that on acres after acres plants have flowered and with time most of them have withered. If we had any idea about what was going to unfold across India, we would not have cultivated so many saplings,” samity president Nikhil Sil said.

“Most of the people who come from other states to buy saplings are Muslims who have panicked over the CAA move,” Sil added.

Sheikh Usman, a trader from Jharkhand’s Rajmahal, said: “We buy the saplings for sale in our state. We make the purchase by the last week of December. But the panic over the NRC has affected our plans.”