Farmers’ Protest in India: A Manifestation of Rural Agrarian Crisis

By: Debottam Saha, Kranthi Nanduri & Raya Das

(All authors contributed equally, names of the authors appear in alphabetical order)

On January 26, 2021, the people of India celebrated the 72nd anniversary of their republic and constitution. Every year on this day, the President of India unfurls the national flag amidst a spectacular parade by the country’s Armed Forces and the cheering citizens in the national capital Delhi. However, what made news this year is the parade of thousands of angry farmers and their tractors breaking down the barriers put up by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) led Indian Government at Delhi borders. Further breaking down the gender barriers, hundreds of women created history by driving tractors and asserting their identity as farmers. This farmers’ ‘tractor rally’ on republic day, demanded the repeal of the three farm Acts that were hastily passed by the Government of India on September 24, 2020, shaking the founding principles of the Constitution of the world’s largest Democracy. The constitutional validity of these Acts is currently challenged by various State Governments and other stakeholders in the Supreme Court.

India witnessed many farmers’ mobilizations since the liberalization of the economy in the 1990s. However, the resistance and unrest accumulated among farmers intensified during the first two years of the Narendra Modi led BJP Government and peaked towards the end of 2020. This period between 2014 and 2016 saw a massive spike in the number of farmer protests from 628 to 4837, nearly a 700 percent increase! In early 2017, Tamil Nadu farmers marched in Delhi wearing garlands of skulls and holding mice in their mouth symbolic of their miseries. Later that year, in Madhya Pradesh, six farmers were killed by police during a protest that shocked the country. These series of protests echo the deepening fear of farmers against the woes of neoliberalism.

The pro neo-liberal Indian state has argued in favour of an ‘ecosystem’ that promotes free market exchange and penetration of private capital into the agrarian sector to increase agricultural growth and productivity. Despite the positive impact of public expenditure in agriculture on its long run output growth, it only doubled while the private expenditure in the sector increased eightfold after the 1990s. The three Acts are designed by the current Government to further withdraw the role of the welfare state in the Indian agricultural sector.

Unfolding Three Farm Acts

1) Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce Act: The act proposes to remove trade barriers and increase the ‘freedom of choice’ for farmers to sell their produce beyond the premises of the government regulated markets (Agricultural Price Produce Markets). The protesting farmers consider it an attempt to weaken the Minimum Support Price (MSP) guaranteed via the ‘Mandi’ system by the Indian Government to cover the increasing cost of cultivation.

Regulated market structure or ‘Mandi’ system was established in India during the 1960s to reduce the exploitation of intermediaries in the agriculture output market and to ensure food security. The MSP system was designed to act as a safety net against market volatility and address distress sale by farmers. MSP was initially offered to farmers to incentivize them to cultivate labour-intensive food crops such as rice and paddy, particularly the ‘dwarf’ varieties or the High Yielding Varieties (HYV) of seeds under the Green Revolution policies to boost the foodgrain production in the country. The latest All India level survey shows that despite regional variance, marginal and small farmers received better prices through MSP compared to the price offered by private traders for both paddy and wheat crops (Das, 2020). Thus, the major fear gripping the protesting farmers is the systematic dismantling of the ‘Mandi’ system making the MSP redundant under the new acts in the pretext of assuring competitive prices.

The 2018 Union budget addressed the need to raise the MSP for doubling farmers’ income. However, the government could not increase the desirable number of APMC markets recommended by the National Commission of Farmers. The central government also maintains that the new farm laws do not directly affect the MSP system. However, in 2006, the BJP led state government in Bihar implemented the model act by scrapping the Agriculture Produce Market Committee (APMC). This drastically reduced the role of the public sector in procuring the crops at a fixed rate. Consequently, farmers engaged in distress sale due to the lack of availability of private traders.

(2) Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act: This act removes food crops from the essential commodities list. After the Independence of India, the government passed Essential Commodities Act, 1955. The purpose of the act was to regulate the production, supply, and storage of essential commodities (including food crops, oilseeds, jute, seed, etc.) and control black marketing. The amendment intends to incentivize private players to invest in food processing and storage facilities. Protestors deem this harmful as the hoarding of produce by private players can encourage the possibility of an artificial price rise.

(3) Farmers Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act: This act promotes pre-fixation of the price through contract farming and intends to eliminate the middlemen or ‘arthiyas’ from the value chain. Such a proposition ignores the critical role played by ‘arthiyas’ in ensuring informal credit for a large section of resource-poor farmers in the face of inadequate institutional rural credit supply. Replacing ‘arthiyas’ with big corporates might reduce the impact of market volatility, but the terms and conditions of these contracts are often not viable for marginal and small farmers (Satish, 2012).

For example, Punjab, one of the leading states in the ongoing protest, experienced contract farming led diversification of agriculture post-liberalization through corporations like PepsiCo and Voltas. Farmers faced uncertainty in farming income due to unequal negotiation terms in agreements with these big companies. The role of contract farming to support small farmers in agriculture is debated in academic and policy circles. It became an essential tool to increase the flow of capital among the small peasants in the Global South as an alternative to land acquisition.

In a nutshell, these agricultural market reforms indicate a giant leap forward in opening up India’s market to neoliberal forces drawing flak from farmers across the nation. Many economists and policymakers raised their voices against these acts and recommended comprehensive agrarian reforms beyond the MSP and subsidies in consultation with major stakeholders. It can be argued that this protest is not an isolated event, rather a culmination of the shortcomings of the agriculture policy discourse since the era of the Green Revolution.

Where did we go wrong? The paradox of the Green Revolution

The very adoption of the Green Revolution in the 1960s is the long historical outcome of the euphoria for Nehruvian scientific modernity which held high regard for modernity, progress, scientific and technological development (Visvanathan, 1997). However, it left us with many paradoxes. First, the technological change in agriculture provided surplus food grain production but through selective practices of mono-cropping which failed to redress India’s problem of malnutrition for decades. The major thrust was on expanding wheat and rice production even at the expense of declining area under cultivation of millets, pulses, and different oilseeds. For instance, the share of non-food crops in Punjab declined drastically from 55 percent in 1966-67 to only 10 percent in 2014-15. Second, the overproduction of foodgrains’ created domestic piles,’ but the food never reached the country’s hungriest. It was due to the lack of understanding among the policymakers about the complex relationship between the food distribution system, social entitlement, and access to food. Third, though the reliance on food imports reduced, the dependence on imports of expensive farm inputs increased. As a result, farmers’ income augmented but at the same time, they found themselves trapped in the vicious cycle of indebtedness. Fourth, this development strategy was idolized to provide every individual from the third world a fair chance to get equal opportunity regardless of their racial and other social identities. However, caste, gender, ethnicity, and class differences have aggravated in the countryside leading to lopsided accumulation processes. Besides, during the 1970s and 1980s, ecological distress soon proved the chemical and water-intensive agricultural practices unsustainable. Soil nutrient depletion and groundwater decline led to degradation of crop quality and dwindled productivity rate (Shiva, 2016). Consequently, this limited the ‘very ability of those farmers to farm in future’ (Kumar, 2015).

In congruence to the Green Revolution’s failure, even the current neoliberal agrarian reforms are a disappointment. They situate ‘profit-making’ as the lynchpin of India’s agrarian developments by overexploitation of natural resources. Even with the ongoing protests, the typical response from the Indian state, while upstaging their interpretation of self-reliance, freedom, reform, and farmers’ choices, fails to acknowledge the embeddedness of ecology and economy. There is systemic negligence to engage with agroecologists who argue to see agriculture beyond the production and income angle. There is a need to consider the complex links among diverse agricultural practices, crops, seasons, culinary and nutrition patterns.

Zooming in on Punjab’s Story

Punjab, an early beneficiary of the Green Revolution and an agriculturally advanced state produced more than a quarter (27.92 percent) of the total wheat and rice production of the entire country in 2014–15. Mechanization and development of capitalist relations in agriculture led to higher yield in food grains along with extreme land inequality and casualization of labour. In 2012-13, almost 46 percent rural households in the state were landless. While 43 percent rural households owned 31 percent of total land, the rest 11 percent owned a gigantic share of 69 percent (Bansal, Usami, & Rawal, 2018). The landlessness in Punjab rose prominently among Dalit, Adivasi, and Muslim households. Once the Green Revolution extended to other states by the 1990s, Punjab also lost its advantage in food grain production. Due to low return over increasing cost of cultivation, many of the small and marginal farmers were pauperized and leased out their land. They mostly engaged as casual wage labourers or self-employed in petty non-farm businesses (Jodhka, 2006; Vatta, 2014). On the other hand, the land and non-land asset concentration among medium and large landowners enabled some of them to enter capital-intensive agribusiness, agro-industries, and transport sectors (Singh, 2000). In recent years, the widening rural inequality is further manifested by the rapid rise in the number of suicides of marginal and small farmers.

Having said that, agriculture still remains the backbone of Punjab’s rural economy for three main reasons. One, majority of the cultivators are still dependent on food grain cultivation as the principal source of income even though they are low value crops. The wheat and paddy crops covered around 90 percent of the cultivated area in Punjab and contributed 76.9% towards production in 2014–15 (Mann, 2017). Farmers continue to produce these crops mainly due to state Government’s support in procurement of crops through ‘Mandis’ and protection against price volatility through MSP. Even though there have been increases in the MSP of other crops such as pulses, cotton, and groundnut, the cropping pattern did not diversify due to absence of marketing and low yield levels of these crops. Two, a large proportion of landless workers are employed in agriculture as casual wage labour. Competition from migrants from neighbouring states of Bihar and Uttar Pradesh to work as agriculture labour forced landless Dalits to seek precarious work in ‘Mandis’ such as porters. Three, incomes from non-agricultural activities, particularly rural manufacturing are much lower than farm incomes. This is in fact one of the key reasons why most medium and large farmers stay put in agriculture until they get better opportunities through the route of migration outside the village (Sugimoto, 2014; Vatta, 2014). The scarcity of alternative and remunerative opportunities in the rural non-farm sector intensified the rural agrarian crisis (Basole & Basu, 2011; Breman, 1976). Against this backdrop, any threat to the ‘Mandis’ and MSP system is a threat to the livelihoods of landless, marginal, small, and big farmers cutting across the caste lines of Dalits as well as Jats in Punjab. The MSP remains a critical policy tool to ensure farmers’ incomes even among other states where the protest may not be visible on the streets.

The ongoing protest has laid bare the challenges in forging a united alliance of farmers in solidarity against the authoritarian state pushing forward neoliberal agenda. Despite the historic conflicts between Dalits and upper caste land owners, a significant number of Dalit unions (not all) joined hands with non-Dalit unions. Another section of vulnerable farmers i.e,. women also raised their voices in solidarity. The protesting unions representing different political parties and ideologies across the country are struggling to locate a firm common ground in their demands. After several rounds of negotiation with these unions in the last few months, the central Government in January 2021 agreed to temporarily suspend the Acts for eighteen months. However, farmers continue to sit at the Delhi borders, unwilling to back down until the government repeals all three Acts.

References

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Basole, A., & Basu, D. (2011). Relations of Production and Modes of Surplus Extraction in India : Part I – Agriculture. Economic and Political Weekly, 46 (14), 41–58.

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Das, R. (2020). Minimum support price in India: what determines farmers’ access? Agricultural Economics Research Review, 33(1), 61.

Jodhka, S. S. (2006). Beyond ‘Crisis’- Rethinking Contemporary Punjab agriculture. Economic and Political Weekly, April, 41 (16), 1530–1537.

Kumar, R. (2015). Rethinking Revolutions: Soyabean, Choupals and the Changing Countryside. New York: Oxford University Press.

Mann, R. S. (2017). Cropping Pattern in Punjab (1966–67 to 2014–15). Economic and Political Weekly, 52(3). 30-33

Satish, P., 2012. “Innovations in Agricultural Credit Market – Rationalisation of Policy Response,” Indian Journal of Agricultural Economics, Indian Society of Agricultural Economics, vol. 67(1), 1-18.

Shiva, V. (2016). The Violence of the Green Revolution: Third World Agriculture, Ecology, and Politics. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky.

Singh, S. (2000). Crisis in Punjab Agriculture. Economic & Political Weekly, 35(23), 1889–1892.

Sugimoto, D. (2014). Impact of Non-Farm Employment on Landholding Structures in Punjab: Comparison of Three Villages. In S. Uchikawa (Ed.), Industrial Clusters. Migrant Workers, and Labour Markets in India (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Vatta, K. (2014). Pattern of Rural Livelihoods in Punjab: The Role of Industrial and Urban Linkages. In S. Uchikawa (Ed.), Industrial Clusters. Migrant Workers, and Labour Markets in India (1st ed.). Palgrave Macmillan UK.

Visvanathan, S. (1997). A Carnival for Science: Essays on Science, Technology, and Development. New York: Oxford University Press, USA.

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