Six Months of Work. Someone Else Decides What It's Worth.
Six Months of Work. Someone Else Decides What It's Worth.
Six Months of Work. Someone Else Decides What It's Worth.
Six Months of Work. Someone Else Decides What It's Worth.
A few years ago I was speaking to a cotton farmer from Yavatmal district in Vidarbha. He had a small plot, around two acres, and he had just finished his harvest after what he described as a “decent season.” Not great, but decent. Rains had cooperated more or less. The crop had come in reasonably well. He was cautiously optimistic.
Then came the part that stayed with me. I asked him what price he expected to get. He shrugged, actually shrugged, the way someone does when a question doesn’t quite make sense, and said it wasn’t really up to him. The traders in the mandi would decide. The government’s announced price was one number; what he actually received would be another. He had no storage facility, couldn’t wait around for weeks, and owed money to a commission agent whose services he couldn’t afford to refuse.
He grew the cotton. He had zero say in its price.
I’ve thought about that conversation often since. Because the more you look into it, the more you realise this isn’t just one farmer’s bad luck. It is the way the system was built, and it was built this way, whether anyone admits it or not, a long time ago.
Go Back to the 1960s. That’s Where This Started.People sometimes talk about the Green Revolution like it’s a pure success story. And look, in some very important ways, it was. India in the mid-1960s was genuinely in trouble. Two bad monsoons back to back, near-empty granaries, a humiliating dependence on American food imports under something called PL-480, a programme that came with political strings attached. The crisis was real. Something had to change.
What changed it was a combination of new high-yielding seed varieties, expanded irrigation, chemical fertilisers, and mechanisation, especially in Punjab, Haryana, and parts of western UP. The results were remarkable. Wheat production shot up. Rice followed. By the 1970s India wasn’t importing food anymore; by the 1980s it had buffer stocks. That’s a genuine achievement and I don’t want to minimise it.
But, and this is the part the triumphant version leaves out, the policy package that came with the Green Revolution also created something else. The Minimum Support Price system and the government’s centralised procurement machinery were set up to protect farmers from volatile markets and to guarantee that the new high-yielding varieties would actually be grown. Makes sense. The problem is what it looked like after twenty, thirty, forty years.
Farmers in Punjab and Haryana had basically stopped growing anything except wheat and rice. Why would they? Those were the only crops for which the government reliably showed up and bought at a declared price. Lentils? Oilseeds? Vegetables? You were on your own with those. So wheat and wheat and more wheat. Rice and rice and more rice. Season after season. The same fields, the same crops, the same chemical inputs.
The land is paying for it now. Water tables in Punjab have dropped so fast that some estimates put certain districts at risk of running dry within a generation. Soil quality has degraded. And the farmers who built this country’s food security are stuck in a pattern they can’t easily escape from, because the safety net, such as it is, only covers the crops they’ve always grown.
This is what a well-intentioned policy looks like after sixty years of path dependency. Not a villain. Just a series of rational decisions that, taken together, built a cage.
The MSP Is Real. The Guarantee Is Not.Every year, the government announces Minimum Support Prices for about two dozen agricultural commodities. The announcement gets coverage. Politicians cite it as evidence of their commitment to farmers. Sometimes there are press releases.
Then comes the part nobody puts in the press release: effective procurement, meaning the government actually purchasing those crops at the declared price, happens for only a handful of commodities, in only a handful of states. Wheat and rice, mainly. A few others in limited quantities. If you’re a groundnut farmer in Andhra or growing arhar dal in Bihar, the MSP announcement is essentially decorative. No agency is coming to your mandi to buy at that price.
So already you have a gap between what the policy promises and what it delivers. But that’s not even the most immediate problem for most farmers.
The most immediate problem is time. Tomatoes rot. Onions don’t keep forever. Even grains lose quality if stored badly. A farmer who harvests in October needs to sell soon, and October is exactly when every other farmer in the region is also selling, which is exactly when supply floods the market and prices crash. If you have cold storage, or a warehouse receipt system that lets you borrow against stored grain, you can wait it out. Most small farmers have neither.
They sell at harvest. They sell cheap. And then they watch the price recover two months later and wonder, not for the first time, why none of that recovery ever reaches them.
Inside the Mandi: Who Actually Has the PowerAgricultural markets, mandis, in India operate under the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Acts, which vary by state but share a common structure. Licensed traders, commission agents (called arhatiyas in many states), and government-regulated auction processes. The original idea was good: regulate the market to prevent farmers from being cheated by unscrupulous buyers.
The actual outcome, in many places, is that the licensed middlemen became the most powerful actors in the system. They have the storage. They have the capital. They have relationships with the big buyers. And often, they are the ones extending informal credit to farmers, which means the farmer who owes money to an arhatiya is also dependent on that same arhatiya to get a fair price when he sells. That is not a situation that tends to produce fair prices.
I want to be careful here not to cast this as a simple morality tale. Commission agents provide real services, credit access, logistics, market knowledge. In places with weak rural banking and poor infrastructure, they fill gaps that the state has failed to fill. They’re not all predatory. But the structural position they occupy gives them enormous leverage over people who have no other options. And leverage, when it’s this lopsided, gets used.
The result: value consistently moves away from the farmer. By the time food reaches your plate in Delhi or Mumbai, it has passed through four, five, sometimes six sets of hands, each of which took a margin. The person who grew it, who bore the weather risk and the input cost and the physical labour, often ends up with the smallest share of what you paid for it.
The Protests of 2020-21: What People Got Wrong About ThemWhen hundreds of thousands of farmers began gathering at Singhu, Tikri, and Ghazipur on the edges of Delhi in late 2020, a lot of the coverage treated it as a regional story, mostly Sikh farmers from Punjab worried about losing their comfortable procurement deals. That framing wasn’t entirely wrong, but it missed something important.
The three farm laws that triggered the protests, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce Act, the Farmers’ Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, and the Essential Commodities Amendment Act, were sold as liberalisation. Open up the markets. Let farmers sell to private buyers anywhere in the country. Reduce the stranglehold of mandis and middlemen. These are not inherently bad ideas. There are genuine economists who think agricultural market reform is necessary.
What the farmers objected to was the absence of a legal guarantee on MSP within those reforms. Their argument, stated plainly, was this: you want to open up markets to private players, fine. But if you don’t legally bind those private players to pay at least the MSP, then eventually, once the government procurement infrastructure has atrophied, we will be completely at the mercy of corporations. We’ve seen what that looks like in other sectors. We don’t want it for food.
That’s not an irrational position. It’s actually a fairly sophisticated reading of how markets work when there’s a large power imbalance between buyers and sellers.
After over a year of protests, through two Delhi winters, through COVID waves, through multiple failed rounds of negotiation, the government repealed all three laws in November 2021. The core demand, a legal guarantee of MSP, was not met. A committee was promised. The farmers went home. The underlying problem remained exactly where it had always been.
There Is a Constitutional Argument Here That Nobody’s Really MadeIn 1985, the Supreme Court of India ruled on a case called Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation. It was about pavement dwellers being evicted from Bombay, not obviously connected to agricultural pricing. But what the Court said has implications that go far beyond the case itself.
The bench held that the right to livelihood is a core component of the right to life under Article 21. You cannot have a meaningful right to live if you have no means to sustain yourself. Strip away the legal language and the point is simple: the Constitution isn’t just concerned with whether you’re breathing. It’s concerned with whether you can actually live.
Now apply that to agricultural pricing. If systematic government policy, through the design of procurement systems, the structure of market regulation, the failure to extend meaningful MSP coverage, consistently deprives a class of people of fair compensation for their work, is that not a livelihood question? Is it not, at some level, an Article 21 question?
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m aware there are complications in making that argument hold in court. But it strikes me as remarkable that in all the farmer protests, all the political debate, all the legal challenges that have been filed over agricultural issues, this particular line of argument has never really been developed and pressed. The constitutional framework for it exists. It simply hasn’t been used.
What Would Actually Need to ChangeI’m going to resist the temptation to produce a tidy list of policy recommendations, because I think that format creates a false sense of simplicity. The problems here are structural and they’ve been building for decades. No five-point plan fixes that.
But some things are clearer than others. Storage infrastructure is probably the most underleveraged intervention available. If a farmer can hold his produce for three weeks after harvest, his negotiating position changes fundamentally. Cold storage, warehouse receipt systems, rural grain silos, these are not glamorous investments, which is probably why they keep getting promised and underfunded. Every state government announces cold storage schemes. The actual rural cold chain remains inadequate.
Farmer Producer Organisations, cooperatives, essentially, where small farmers pool their produce and bargain collectively, have real potential. When ten thousand small farmers act as a single seller, they are no longer powerless in front of a large corporate buyer. The government has made commitments to expand FPOs and the results in some states have been encouraging. But the support systems around them, access to credit, market linkages, professional management, need to be much stronger.
Digital platforms like e-NAM, the Electronic National Agriculture Market, were set up to connect farmers with buyers across state borders, reducing dependence on local middlemen. The idea is sound. Implementation has been inconsistent, partly because state governments have been reluctant to give up control over their mandi systems, and partly because digital access in rural India is still uneven enough that a platform that exists online is not automatically a platform that rural farmers can use.
And then there is the question of MSP itself. Making it a legal entitlement, so that any buyer, private or government, is required to pay at least the support price, is the demand that farmer movements have consistently made and that successive governments have consistently refused. The political economy of that refusal is complicated. Agribusiness interests are real. State capacity to enforce such a mandate is genuinely limited. But the demand is not unreasonable, and dismissing it as economically naive misses the point that the current system is also not neutral, it just distributes the costs differently, and mostly onto the farmer.
The Thing That Keeps Bothering MeI keep coming back to something that should be obvious but somehow isn’t.
Agriculture is described, in official speeches and policy documents and economics textbooks, as the backbone of the Indian economy. Farmers are celebrated. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. They are invoked at political rallies and mourned when their suicides make the news, which is too often.
And yet the system we have built, through the specific choices made during the Green Revolution, through the APMC architecture, through procurement policies that cover some crops and not others, through chronic underinvestment in rural storage and market infrastructure, is a system that consistently ensures the farmer has less power than almost everyone else in the food supply chain.
That contradiction is not an accident. It’s not exactly intentional either. It’s the accumulated result of choices that made sense at the time they were made, evaluated by the standards of the time they were made, and never fully revisited when circumstances changed.
The farmer in Yavatmal who shrugged when I asked him about prices, he wasn’t being passive. He was being realistic. He had learned, over years, exactly how much his opinion of his own crop’s value mattered in the market.
It didn’t. And until that changes, through genuine reform, not just announced schemes and repaired committees, it won’t.
Disclaimer
This article is published by CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online) strictly for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, legal opinion, or any form of professional counsel, and must not be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with a qualified legal practitioner. Nothing contained herein shall be construed as creating a lawyer-client relationship between the reader and the author, publisher, or CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online).
All views, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and represent independent academic analysis. CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online) does not endorse, verify, or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the content, and expressly disclaims any responsibility for the same.
While reasonable efforts are made to ensure that the information presented is accurate and up to date, no warranties or representations, express or implied, are made regarding its correctness, adequacy, or applicability to any specific factual or legal situation. Laws, regulations, and judicial interpretations are subject to change, and the content may not reflect the most current legal developments.
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online), the author, editors, and publisher disclaim all liability for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising out of or in connection with the use of, or reliance upon, this article.
Readers are strongly advised to seek independent legal advice from a qualified professional before making any decisions or taking any action based on the contents of this article. Reliance on any information provided in this article is strictly at the reader's own risk.
By accessing and using this article, the reader expressly agrees to the terms of this disclaimer.
A few years ago I was speaking to a cotton farmer from Yavatmal district in Vidarbha. He had a small plot, around two acres, and he had just finished his harvest after what he described as a “decent season.” Not great, but decent. Rains had cooperated more or less. The crop had come in reasonably well. He was cautiously optimistic.
Then came the part that stayed with me. I asked him what price he expected to get. He shrugged, actually shrugged, the way someone does when a question doesn’t quite make sense, and said it wasn’t really up to him. The traders in the mandi would decide. The government’s announced price was one number; what he actually received would be another. He had no storage facility, couldn’t wait around for weeks, and owed money to a commission agent whose services he couldn’t afford to refuse.
He grew the cotton. He had zero say in its price.
I’ve thought about that conversation often since. Because the more you look into it, the more you realise this isn’t just one farmer’s bad luck. It is the way the system was built, and it was built this way, whether anyone admits it or not, a long time ago.
Go Back to the 1960s. That’s Where This Started.People sometimes talk about the Green Revolution like it’s a pure success story. And look, in some very important ways, it was. India in the mid-1960s was genuinely in trouble. Two bad monsoons back to back, near-empty granaries, a humiliating dependence on American food imports under something called PL-480, a programme that came with political strings attached. The crisis was real. Something had to change.
What changed it was a combination of new high-yielding seed varieties, expanded irrigation, chemical fertilisers, and mechanisation, especially in Punjab, Haryana, and parts of western UP. The results were remarkable. Wheat production shot up. Rice followed. By the 1970s India wasn’t importing food anymore; by the 1980s it had buffer stocks. That’s a genuine achievement and I don’t want to minimise it.
But, and this is the part the triumphant version leaves out, the policy package that came with the Green Revolution also created something else. The Minimum Support Price system and the government’s centralised procurement machinery were set up to protect farmers from volatile markets and to guarantee that the new high-yielding varieties would actually be grown. Makes sense. The problem is what it looked like after twenty, thirty, forty years.
Farmers in Punjab and Haryana had basically stopped growing anything except wheat and rice. Why would they? Those were the only crops for which the government reliably showed up and bought at a declared price. Lentils? Oilseeds? Vegetables? You were on your own with those. So wheat and wheat and more wheat. Rice and rice and more rice. Season after season. The same fields, the same crops, the same chemical inputs.
The land is paying for it now. Water tables in Punjab have dropped so fast that some estimates put certain districts at risk of running dry within a generation. Soil quality has degraded. And the farmers who built this country’s food security are stuck in a pattern they can’t easily escape from, because the safety net, such as it is, only covers the crops they’ve always grown.
This is what a well-intentioned policy looks like after sixty years of path dependency. Not a villain. Just a series of rational decisions that, taken together, built a cage.
The MSP Is Real. The Guarantee Is Not.Every year, the government announces Minimum Support Prices for about two dozen agricultural commodities. The announcement gets coverage. Politicians cite it as evidence of their commitment to farmers. Sometimes there are press releases.
Then comes the part nobody puts in the press release: effective procurement, meaning the government actually purchasing those crops at the declared price, happens for only a handful of commodities, in only a handful of states. Wheat and rice, mainly. A few others in limited quantities. If you’re a groundnut farmer in Andhra or growing arhar dal in Bihar, the MSP announcement is essentially decorative. No agency is coming to your mandi to buy at that price.
So already you have a gap between what the policy promises and what it delivers. But that’s not even the most immediate problem for most farmers.
The most immediate problem is time. Tomatoes rot. Onions don’t keep forever. Even grains lose quality if stored badly. A farmer who harvests in October needs to sell soon, and October is exactly when every other farmer in the region is also selling, which is exactly when supply floods the market and prices crash. If you have cold storage, or a warehouse receipt system that lets you borrow against stored grain, you can wait it out. Most small farmers have neither.
They sell at harvest. They sell cheap. And then they watch the price recover two months later and wonder, not for the first time, why none of that recovery ever reaches them.
Inside the Mandi: Who Actually Has the PowerAgricultural markets, mandis, in India operate under the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Acts, which vary by state but share a common structure. Licensed traders, commission agents (called arhatiyas in many states), and government-regulated auction processes. The original idea was good: regulate the market to prevent farmers from being cheated by unscrupulous buyers.
The actual outcome, in many places, is that the licensed middlemen became the most powerful actors in the system. They have the storage. They have the capital. They have relationships with the big buyers. And often, they are the ones extending informal credit to farmers, which means the farmer who owes money to an arhatiya is also dependent on that same arhatiya to get a fair price when he sells. That is not a situation that tends to produce fair prices.
I want to be careful here not to cast this as a simple morality tale. Commission agents provide real services, credit access, logistics, market knowledge. In places with weak rural banking and poor infrastructure, they fill gaps that the state has failed to fill. They’re not all predatory. But the structural position they occupy gives them enormous leverage over people who have no other options. And leverage, when it’s this lopsided, gets used.
The result: value consistently moves away from the farmer. By the time food reaches your plate in Delhi or Mumbai, it has passed through four, five, sometimes six sets of hands, each of which took a margin. The person who grew it, who bore the weather risk and the input cost and the physical labour, often ends up with the smallest share of what you paid for it.
The Protests of 2020-21: What People Got Wrong About ThemWhen hundreds of thousands of farmers began gathering at Singhu, Tikri, and Ghazipur on the edges of Delhi in late 2020, a lot of the coverage treated it as a regional story, mostly Sikh farmers from Punjab worried about losing their comfortable procurement deals. That framing wasn’t entirely wrong, but it missed something important.
The three farm laws that triggered the protests, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce Act, the Farmers’ Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, and the Essential Commodities Amendment Act, were sold as liberalisation. Open up the markets. Let farmers sell to private buyers anywhere in the country. Reduce the stranglehold of mandis and middlemen. These are not inherently bad ideas. There are genuine economists who think agricultural market reform is necessary.
What the farmers objected to was the absence of a legal guarantee on MSP within those reforms. Their argument, stated plainly, was this: you want to open up markets to private players, fine. But if you don’t legally bind those private players to pay at least the MSP, then eventually, once the government procurement infrastructure has atrophied, we will be completely at the mercy of corporations. We’ve seen what that looks like in other sectors. We don’t want it for food.
That’s not an irrational position. It’s actually a fairly sophisticated reading of how markets work when there’s a large power imbalance between buyers and sellers.
After over a year of protests, through two Delhi winters, through COVID waves, through multiple failed rounds of negotiation, the government repealed all three laws in November 2021. The core demand, a legal guarantee of MSP, was not met. A committee was promised. The farmers went home. The underlying problem remained exactly where it had always been.
There Is a Constitutional Argument Here That Nobody’s Really MadeIn 1985, the Supreme Court of India ruled on a case called Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation. It was about pavement dwellers being evicted from Bombay, not obviously connected to agricultural pricing. But what the Court said has implications that go far beyond the case itself.
The bench held that the right to livelihood is a core component of the right to life under Article 21. You cannot have a meaningful right to live if you have no means to sustain yourself. Strip away the legal language and the point is simple: the Constitution isn’t just concerned with whether you’re breathing. It’s concerned with whether you can actually live.
Now apply that to agricultural pricing. If systematic government policy, through the design of procurement systems, the structure of market regulation, the failure to extend meaningful MSP coverage, consistently deprives a class of people of fair compensation for their work, is that not a livelihood question? Is it not, at some level, an Article 21 question?
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m aware there are complications in making that argument hold in court. But it strikes me as remarkable that in all the farmer protests, all the political debate, all the legal challenges that have been filed over agricultural issues, this particular line of argument has never really been developed and pressed. The constitutional framework for it exists. It simply hasn’t been used.
What Would Actually Need to ChangeI’m going to resist the temptation to produce a tidy list of policy recommendations, because I think that format creates a false sense of simplicity. The problems here are structural and they’ve been building for decades. No five-point plan fixes that.
But some things are clearer than others. Storage infrastructure is probably the most underleveraged intervention available. If a farmer can hold his produce for three weeks after harvest, his negotiating position changes fundamentally. Cold storage, warehouse receipt systems, rural grain silos, these are not glamorous investments, which is probably why they keep getting promised and underfunded. Every state government announces cold storage schemes. The actual rural cold chain remains inadequate.
Farmer Producer Organisations, cooperatives, essentially, where small farmers pool their produce and bargain collectively, have real potential. When ten thousand small farmers act as a single seller, they are no longer powerless in front of a large corporate buyer. The government has made commitments to expand FPOs and the results in some states have been encouraging. But the support systems around them, access to credit, market linkages, professional management, need to be much stronger.
Digital platforms like e-NAM, the Electronic National Agriculture Market, were set up to connect farmers with buyers across state borders, reducing dependence on local middlemen. The idea is sound. Implementation has been inconsistent, partly because state governments have been reluctant to give up control over their mandi systems, and partly because digital access in rural India is still uneven enough that a platform that exists online is not automatically a platform that rural farmers can use.
And then there is the question of MSP itself. Making it a legal entitlement, so that any buyer, private or government, is required to pay at least the support price, is the demand that farmer movements have consistently made and that successive governments have consistently refused. The political economy of that refusal is complicated. Agribusiness interests are real. State capacity to enforce such a mandate is genuinely limited. But the demand is not unreasonable, and dismissing it as economically naive misses the point that the current system is also not neutral, it just distributes the costs differently, and mostly onto the farmer.
The Thing That Keeps Bothering MeI keep coming back to something that should be obvious but somehow isn’t.
Agriculture is described, in official speeches and policy documents and economics textbooks, as the backbone of the Indian economy. Farmers are celebrated. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. They are invoked at political rallies and mourned when their suicides make the news, which is too often.
And yet the system we have built, through the specific choices made during the Green Revolution, through the APMC architecture, through procurement policies that cover some crops and not others, through chronic underinvestment in rural storage and market infrastructure, is a system that consistently ensures the farmer has less power than almost everyone else in the food supply chain.
That contradiction is not an accident. It’s not exactly intentional either. It’s the accumulated result of choices that made sense at the time they were made, evaluated by the standards of the time they were made, and never fully revisited when circumstances changed.
The farmer in Yavatmal who shrugged when I asked him about prices, he wasn’t being passive. He was being realistic. He had learned, over years, exactly how much his opinion of his own crop’s value mattered in the market.
It didn’t. And until that changes, through genuine reform, not just announced schemes and repaired committees, it won’t.
Disclaimer
This article is published by CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online) strictly for educational and informational purposes only. It does not constitute legal advice, legal opinion, or any form of professional counsel, and must not be relied upon as a substitute for consultation with a qualified legal practitioner. Nothing contained herein shall be construed as creating a lawyer-client relationship between the reader and the author, publisher, or CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online).
All views, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this article are solely those of the author and represent independent academic analysis. CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online) does not endorse, verify, or guarantee the accuracy, completeness, or reliability of the content, and expressly disclaims any responsibility for the same.
While reasonable efforts are made to ensure that the information presented is accurate and up to date, no warranties or representations, express or implied, are made regarding its correctness, adequacy, or applicability to any specific factual or legal situation. Laws, regulations, and judicial interpretations are subject to change, and the content may not reflect the most current legal developments.
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, CLEAR LAW (clearlaw.online), the author, editors, and publisher disclaim all liability for any direct, indirect, incidental, consequential, or special damages arising out of or in connection with the use of, or reliance upon, this article.
Readers are strongly advised to seek independent legal advice from a qualified professional before making any decisions or taking any action based on the contents of this article. Reliance on any information provided in this article is strictly at the reader's own risk.
By accessing and using this article, the reader expressly agrees to the terms of this disclaimer.
A few years ago I was speaking to a cotton farmer from Yavatmal district in Vidarbha. He had a small plot, around two acres, and he had just finished his harvest after what he described as a “decent season.” Not great, but decent. Rains had cooperated more or less. The crop had come in reasonably well. He was cautiously optimistic.
Then came the part that stayed with me. I asked him what price he expected to get. He shrugged, actually shrugged, the way someone does when a question doesn’t quite make sense, and said it wasn’t really up to him. The traders in the mandi would decide. The government’s announced price was one number; what he actually received would be another. He had no storage facility, couldn’t wait around for weeks, and owed money to a commission agent whose services he couldn’t afford to refuse.
He grew the cotton. He had zero say in its price.
I’ve thought about that conversation often since. Because the more you look into it, the more you realise this isn’t just one farmer’s bad luck. It is the way the system was built, and it was built this way, whether anyone admits it or not, a long time ago.
Go Back to the 1960s. That’s Where This Started.People sometimes talk about the Green Revolution like it’s a pure success story. And look, in some very important ways, it was. India in the mid-1960s was genuinely in trouble. Two bad monsoons back to back, near-empty granaries, a humiliating dependence on American food imports under something called PL-480, a programme that came with political strings attached. The crisis was real. Something had to change.
What changed it was a combination of new high-yielding seed varieties, expanded irrigation, chemical fertilisers, and mechanisation, especially in Punjab, Haryana, and parts of western UP. The results were remarkable. Wheat production shot up. Rice followed. By the 1970s India wasn’t importing food anymore; by the 1980s it had buffer stocks. That’s a genuine achievement and I don’t want to minimise it.
But, and this is the part the triumphant version leaves out, the policy package that came with the Green Revolution also created something else. The Minimum Support Price system and the government’s centralised procurement machinery were set up to protect farmers from volatile markets and to guarantee that the new high-yielding varieties would actually be grown. Makes sense. The problem is what it looked like after twenty, thirty, forty years.
Farmers in Punjab and Haryana had basically stopped growing anything except wheat and rice. Why would they? Those were the only crops for which the government reliably showed up and bought at a declared price. Lentils? Oilseeds? Vegetables? You were on your own with those. So wheat and wheat and more wheat. Rice and rice and more rice. Season after season. The same fields, the same crops, the same chemical inputs.
The land is paying for it now. Water tables in Punjab have dropped so fast that some estimates put certain districts at risk of running dry within a generation. Soil quality has degraded. And the farmers who built this country’s food security are stuck in a pattern they can’t easily escape from, because the safety net, such as it is, only covers the crops they’ve always grown.
This is what a well-intentioned policy looks like after sixty years of path dependency. Not a villain. Just a series of rational decisions that, taken together, built a cage.
The MSP Is Real. The Guarantee Is Not.Every year, the government announces Minimum Support Prices for about two dozen agricultural commodities. The announcement gets coverage. Politicians cite it as evidence of their commitment to farmers. Sometimes there are press releases.
Then comes the part nobody puts in the press release: effective procurement, meaning the government actually purchasing those crops at the declared price, happens for only a handful of commodities, in only a handful of states. Wheat and rice, mainly. A few others in limited quantities. If you’re a groundnut farmer in Andhra or growing arhar dal in Bihar, the MSP announcement is essentially decorative. No agency is coming to your mandi to buy at that price.
So already you have a gap between what the policy promises and what it delivers. But that’s not even the most immediate problem for most farmers.
The most immediate problem is time. Tomatoes rot. Onions don’t keep forever. Even grains lose quality if stored badly. A farmer who harvests in October needs to sell soon, and October is exactly when every other farmer in the region is also selling, which is exactly when supply floods the market and prices crash. If you have cold storage, or a warehouse receipt system that lets you borrow against stored grain, you can wait it out. Most small farmers have neither.
They sell at harvest. They sell cheap. And then they watch the price recover two months later and wonder, not for the first time, why none of that recovery ever reaches them.
Inside the Mandi: Who Actually Has the PowerAgricultural markets, mandis, in India operate under the Agricultural Produce Market Committee Acts, which vary by state but share a common structure. Licensed traders, commission agents (called arhatiyas in many states), and government-regulated auction processes. The original idea was good: regulate the market to prevent farmers from being cheated by unscrupulous buyers.
The actual outcome, in many places, is that the licensed middlemen became the most powerful actors in the system. They have the storage. They have the capital. They have relationships with the big buyers. And often, they are the ones extending informal credit to farmers, which means the farmer who owes money to an arhatiya is also dependent on that same arhatiya to get a fair price when he sells. That is not a situation that tends to produce fair prices.
I want to be careful here not to cast this as a simple morality tale. Commission agents provide real services, credit access, logistics, market knowledge. In places with weak rural banking and poor infrastructure, they fill gaps that the state has failed to fill. They’re not all predatory. But the structural position they occupy gives them enormous leverage over people who have no other options. And leverage, when it’s this lopsided, gets used.
The result: value consistently moves away from the farmer. By the time food reaches your plate in Delhi or Mumbai, it has passed through four, five, sometimes six sets of hands, each of which took a margin. The person who grew it, who bore the weather risk and the input cost and the physical labour, often ends up with the smallest share of what you paid for it.
The Protests of 2020-21: What People Got Wrong About ThemWhen hundreds of thousands of farmers began gathering at Singhu, Tikri, and Ghazipur on the edges of Delhi in late 2020, a lot of the coverage treated it as a regional story, mostly Sikh farmers from Punjab worried about losing their comfortable procurement deals. That framing wasn’t entirely wrong, but it missed something important.
The three farm laws that triggered the protests, the Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce Act, the Farmers’ Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, and the Essential Commodities Amendment Act, were sold as liberalisation. Open up the markets. Let farmers sell to private buyers anywhere in the country. Reduce the stranglehold of mandis and middlemen. These are not inherently bad ideas. There are genuine economists who think agricultural market reform is necessary.
What the farmers objected to was the absence of a legal guarantee on MSP within those reforms. Their argument, stated plainly, was this: you want to open up markets to private players, fine. But if you don’t legally bind those private players to pay at least the MSP, then eventually, once the government procurement infrastructure has atrophied, we will be completely at the mercy of corporations. We’ve seen what that looks like in other sectors. We don’t want it for food.
That’s not an irrational position. It’s actually a fairly sophisticated reading of how markets work when there’s a large power imbalance between buyers and sellers.
After over a year of protests, through two Delhi winters, through COVID waves, through multiple failed rounds of negotiation, the government repealed all three laws in November 2021. The core demand, a legal guarantee of MSP, was not met. A committee was promised. The farmers went home. The underlying problem remained exactly where it had always been.
There Is a Constitutional Argument Here That Nobody’s Really MadeIn 1985, the Supreme Court of India ruled on a case called Olga Tellis v. Bombay Municipal Corporation. It was about pavement dwellers being evicted from Bombay, not obviously connected to agricultural pricing. But what the Court said has implications that go far beyond the case itself.
The bench held that the right to livelihood is a core component of the right to life under Article 21. You cannot have a meaningful right to live if you have no means to sustain yourself. Strip away the legal language and the point is simple: the Constitution isn’t just concerned with whether you’re breathing. It’s concerned with whether you can actually live.
Now apply that to agricultural pricing. If systematic government policy, through the design of procurement systems, the structure of market regulation, the failure to extend meaningful MSP coverage, consistently deprives a class of people of fair compensation for their work, is that not a livelihood question? Is it not, at some level, an Article 21 question?
I’m not a lawyer, and I’m aware there are complications in making that argument hold in court. But it strikes me as remarkable that in all the farmer protests, all the political debate, all the legal challenges that have been filed over agricultural issues, this particular line of argument has never really been developed and pressed. The constitutional framework for it exists. It simply hasn’t been used.
What Would Actually Need to ChangeI’m going to resist the temptation to produce a tidy list of policy recommendations, because I think that format creates a false sense of simplicity. The problems here are structural and they’ve been building for decades. No five-point plan fixes that.
But some things are clearer than others. Storage infrastructure is probably the most underleveraged intervention available. If a farmer can hold his produce for three weeks after harvest, his negotiating position changes fundamentally. Cold storage, warehouse receipt systems, rural grain silos, these are not glamorous investments, which is probably why they keep getting promised and underfunded. Every state government announces cold storage schemes. The actual rural cold chain remains inadequate.
Farmer Producer Organisations, cooperatives, essentially, where small farmers pool their produce and bargain collectively, have real potential. When ten thousand small farmers act as a single seller, they are no longer powerless in front of a large corporate buyer. The government has made commitments to expand FPOs and the results in some states have been encouraging. But the support systems around them, access to credit, market linkages, professional management, need to be much stronger.
Digital platforms like e-NAM, the Electronic National Agriculture Market, were set up to connect farmers with buyers across state borders, reducing dependence on local middlemen. The idea is sound. Implementation has been inconsistent, partly because state governments have been reluctant to give up control over their mandi systems, and partly because digital access in rural India is still uneven enough that a platform that exists online is not automatically a platform that rural farmers can use.
And then there is the question of MSP itself. Making it a legal entitlement, so that any buyer, private or government, is required to pay at least the support price, is the demand that farmer movements have consistently made and that successive governments have consistently refused. The political economy of that refusal is complicated. Agribusiness interests are real. State capacity to enforce such a mandate is genuinely limited. But the demand is not unreasonable, and dismissing it as economically naive misses the point that the current system is also not neutral, it just distributes the costs differently, and mostly onto the farmer.
The Thing That Keeps Bothering MeI keep coming back to something that should be obvious but somehow isn’t.
Agriculture is described, in official speeches and policy documents and economics textbooks, as the backbone of the Indian economy. Farmers are celebrated. Jai Jawan, Jai Kisan. They are invoked at political rallies and mourned when their suicides make the news, which is too often.
And yet the system we have built, through the specific choices made during the Green Revolution, through the APMC architecture, through procurement policies that cover some crops and not others, through chronic underinvestment in rural storage and market infrastructure, is a system that consistently ensures the farmer has less power than almost everyone else in the food supply chain.
That contradiction is not an accident. It’s not exactly intentional either. It’s the accumulated result of choices that made sense at the time they were made, evaluated by the standards of the time they were made, and never fully revisited when circumstances changed.
The farmer in Yavatmal who shrugged when I asked him about prices, he wasn’t being passive. He was being realistic. He had learned, over years, exactly how much his opinion of his own crop’s value mattered in the market.
It didn’t. And until that changes, through genuine reform, not just announced schemes and repaired committees, it won’t.
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