Budget of farmers’ protests may have touched Rs 1000 Cr!

The costliest drama right now in India is not ‘RRR’ or something. It’s the farmers’ protest in Punjab and on the outskirts of Delhi. As many as one lakh farmers are estimated to be protesting against the Modi government’s agriculture bills. And this has gone on for about two months. Many have raised questions about where the protestors are getting their funds from. How are they able to sustain the agitation? It’s not a small amount. Just the basic expenditure is said to be running into hundreds of crores. 

Columnist Abhijit Majumder writes, “Do the math. At least a lakh protesters camping for over 60 days. Roughly Rs 1,000 per person daily on food, tents, massage etc. That’s Rs 600 crore. Plus paying event managers of this chaos. Very conservatively, it’s well over Rs 1,000 crore. Who is footing the bill? ‘Poor farmers’?”

The budget of the protests is whopping. 

There is actually a bigger cost. Due to the blockade done by the farmers, several factories have been ruined. As per an India Today report, the illegal blockade by the agitators has halted work in as many as 1,800 factories on the Delhi-Haryana border. This has left thousands of poor wage-earners jobless. 

It’s only a section of farmers of Punjab and Haryana who have a problem with the farm laws.