CHANDIGARH: Responding to a petition filed by an Uttar Pradesh (UP) farmer against the Haryana authorities’ refusal to procure his produce in alleged violation of new agriculture laws, the state government has claimed that its market yards are excluded from the purview of the Centre’s new farm laws.
Haryana advocate general Baldev Raj Mahajan on Thursday orally informed the HC that the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020 is not applicable to trade inside the state market yards.
‘New laws provide freedom for inter-state trade’
Referring to Section 2 (m) of the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020, Mahajan submitted that the "trade area" under the new law does not include "the premises, enclosures and structures constituting physical boundaries of principal market yards, sub-market yards and market sub-yards managed and run by the market committees formed under each State APMC Act in force in India".
Mahajan, however, sought some more time to file a detailed reply on the issue raised by the petitioner in this case.
"Since the question involved in the case is not restricted to the state of Haryana, therefore, the counsel for the petitioner seeks time to amend the petition so as to implead the Union of India and Union Territory, Chandigarh, as well as the state of Punjab as parties to the petition-.…Reply be also filed by the state of Haryana by the next date of hearing," observed Justice Rajbir Singh Sehrawat of the HC while adjourning the case for November 12.
The matter had reached the HC in the wake of a petition filed by Virender Singh, 58, a resident of Karnal district in Haryana. The petitioner is into farming for the last many years and in July 2020, he and his family members had sown A Grade – Super 5 variety of paddy on around 75 acres of land owned by them in Chillaur village of UP’s Muzaffarnagar district. He wanted to sell his crop in Haryana mandis at the Minimum Support Price (MSP) but the Karnal district administration did not allow him to do so.
His main contention was that since the new act provides absolute freedom to the farmers and traders to carry on interstate or intra-state trade and commerce in farmers’ produce, the state authorities in Haryana cannot stop him from selling their produce in the state.