About 400 members of the Sikh community in Calcutta marched in protest on Sunday morning against the Centre’s farm bills, saying those would ruin the livelihoods of over eighty per cent farmers of the country. The bills received the President’s assent in the evening.

The men and women, who walked from Gurdwara Sant Kutiya on Harish Mukherjee Road to the Gandhi statue on Mayo Road, said those who would be affected were small and medium farmers who owned small tracts of lands.

The protestors, many of whom said they had farmland in Punjab and Haryana, demanded an undertaking from the Centre that the minimum support price would not be withdrawn after the bills were signed into law.

Seven of the protesters later submitted a list of grievances at Raj Bhavan.

If the bills become law in the current form, protesters said, the farmers will be at the mercy of big companies.

“The biggest worry is that the minimum support prices (MSP), which have helped farmers survive for so many years, will be done away with. The Prime Minister has said that the MSP will not be removed, but that is only a verbal assurance,” said Avtar Singh, one of those who walked in the rally.

“The farmers will feel assured only if there is something in writing from the Centre that the MSP will not be removed,” said Avtar, gene-ral secretary of Gurdwara Sant Kutiya.

Gursharan Singh, a resident of Behala who runs a transport business, feared that the bills, once turned into law, would lead to a situation where farmers will be forced to sell their produce at a price lower than the cost of production.

Gursharan, whose family owns farmland in Punjab’s Gurdaspur district, said crops for which MSP was not declared were often thrown away by farmers in protest. “Every year, we hear farmers throwing away crops because they get very low prices. But farmers who cultivate rice and wheat do not have to do this since they are guaranteed an MSP. If the security of MSP is taken away, we will start hearing about more such protests (involving throwing away of produce),” he said.

A counter-argument is that once an MSP is set, no private player will pay more than that, and the MSP will become the unofficial “maximum” price, leaving farmers at a disadvantage.

The Farmer’s Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Bill, 2020, and the Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement of Price Assurance and Farm Services Bill, 2020, was passed by Parliament earlier this month.

In Sunday’s rally, organised by the Calcutta Sikh Sangat, people walked with posters that read “I support farmers” and “Rollback anti-farmer bill”.

“If farmers are devastated, all others will be affected. If two or three companies dominate the market and buy most of the produce directly from farmers, they will be in a position to control retail prices,” said a protester.