Crowds Of Indian Farmers Gather For Days To Protest New Agriculture Laws

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Farmers raise slogans during a protest Thursday on a highway at the Delhi-Haryana state border, India. Tens and thousands of farmers have descended upon the borders of New Delhi to protest new farming laws that they say will open them to corporate exploitation.

Manish Swarup/AP

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Manish Swarup/AP

An Indian farmer looks through the barbed wires put up by the police at the site of a protest on Thursday.

Manish Swarup/AP

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Manish Swarup/AP

But it also manages to do that with fewer workers, compared to back in Gandhi’s day.

«The heart of the matter is that India has too many farmers, says Sadanand Dhume, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. «So what you have is a government that is trying to improve the lives of those farmers by giving them more choices. But you also a section of farmers who are gripped by a very understandable anxiety about what these changes may end up meaning for their lives.

Dhume says the government rushed out these agricultural laws, without consulting farmers, and did a poor job of explaining them to those who would be most affected. It also did so in September, at a time when government-regulated wholesale markets were shut, because of the pandemic. So farmers felt particularly vulnerable. And many of them already live so close to the bone.

On top of that, India has now entered a recession – two consecutive quarters of negative growth — for the first time since the government began publishing quarterly GDP figures.

The coronavirus has erased the robust economic growth India enjoyed for decades. So it’s not the right time for the government to try to deregulate and wean farmers off state support, says Jayati Ghosh, a development economist.

«Alternative occupations are not emerging. We are not industrializing rapidly enough, and we are not generating manufacturing employment. So there’s nothing else for people to do, Ghosh says. «The way to diversify is not to kill off a sector, but to make another sector much more attractive and available, with income opportunities – and that hasn’t happened.

Farmers are desperate, she says. But so are workers in other sectors. Unemployment had already hit a four-decade high, even before the COVID-19 outbreak.

Since independence from Britain in 1947, India’s economy has overall been a success story. Hundreds of millions of people have emerged from poverty. The challenge now is to prevent them all from slipping backward.

«Never mind the cold, or the water cannons and tear gas from police, an unidentified female farmer told local TV earlier this week as protests raged around her in Delhi.

«We’ll stay here all winter, until we get help.