Mumbai: In the first week of March 2025, days before farm unions were to begin a week-long sit-in protest in Punjab’s capital city Chandigarh—a bid to escalate pressure and supplement farmer protests already underway at various points along the state’s borders—nearly a dozen farm union leaders were detained or visited at home by policemen.
Manjit Singh Rai, state president of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Doaba), one of the BKU’s many factions, was among them. “I was under virtual house arrest,” Rai said.
In the days leading up to 5 March, the state police rounded up more than 300 farmers and farm union leaders, snuffing out the planned agitation in Chandigarh.
It was the first indication that the Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government in Punjab and chief minister Bhagwant Mann were looking to act decisively against protesting farmers who blockaded the Shambhu and Khanauri border crossings between Punjab and Haryana in February 2024 when their march to Delhi was halted by Haryana police, and had since remained camped there on the highways.
Only days earlier, on 3 March, Mann walked out of a meeting with farmer leaders in a huff, midway through discussions, reportedly infuriated at the unionists’ plans to march to the state capital. “I’ve been in negotiations at even a prime ministerial level,” senior farm leader Balbir Singh Rajewal told news crews outside. “But I’ve never seen a leader get this enraged.”
Subsequently, several farmer leaders in the Doaba region of Punjab, the northern and eastern districts lying between the Sutlej and Beas rivers, were detained in their homes or picked up, effectively rendering the proposed march to Chandigarh a non-starter.
“It was the state government’s move to silence the voice of farmers,” Rai said.
The AAP, which had supported the 2020-21 farm agitation against the union government, chose to act on behalf of corporate interests that had recently been bemoaning the economic repercussions of the loss of business due to the prolonged highway blockades, said farm leaders.
Camps Are Dismantled
These developments notwithstanding, on the evening of 19 March, the 700-800 farmers present at the Khanauri (Sangrur district) and Shambhu (Patiala district) protest sites were still taken aback when nearly 3,000 men of the Punjab police arrived to dismantle their camps.
About 300 farmers were detained, including women. Across the border, the Haryana government brought in earth-movers and demolished the cement barricades it had erected a year earlier to prevent farmers from proceeding with their trucks and trolleys towards New Delhi. The cement barricades and the protestors’ camp had blocked the highway at Shambhu for 399 days, and on 19 and 20 March, it was reopened for traffic overnight.
Strategically, the protestors’ leaders who were in a delegation visiting Chandigarh that day for talks with the state and central government were arrested on their way back, in Mohali, 10 km from the capital.
Among the delegates arrested in Mohali was Jagjit Singh Dallewal, 70, who had been on a fast-unto-death since 26 November 2024, to persuade the Union government to announce a law making it mandatory for all purchase of farm goods to be at or above the minimum support price (MSP, or the rate at which the government procures farm commodities).
Dallewal, whose health farm unionists described as fragile, was taken to a local hospital, then moved to Patiala, before being moved to Jalandhar, more than 150 km away, and then back to a private hospital in Patiala a few days later.
The farm leaders were placed in police custody (after their preventive arrest) in three different jails, before being released five to nine days later, the last of them emerging from Patiala central jail in the wee hours of 28 March.
It was Dallewal’s 123rd day without food—upon arrest he had also refused to drink water—and once news arrived that almost all the arrested farmers had been released, the 70-year-old accepted water and medical aid.
“It was a violent and undemocratic act by the Punjab police to forcibly remove protesting farmers,” Abhimanyu Kohar, one of the arrested leaders, also a close aide of Dallewal, told Article 14. Never before in the long history of farm protests in Punjab, he said, had a delegation been invited for talks and then arrested “in an immoral act, by cheating us”.
Same Demands, Persisting Problems
The farmers at Shambhu and Khanauri were protesting under the banner of the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM)-Non Political, a group of unions that splintered from the larger federation that undertook the historic year-long farm protest on the outskirts of Delhi in 2020-21.
The current stir, launched in February 2024 with a call for another march to Delhi, hoped to force the government to act on other assurances made when the 2020-21 agitation ended with the repeal of three contentious laws on marketing of farm produce—mainly a law guaranteeing farmers sale of their produce at MSP or above and withdrawal of criminal cases lodged against farm protesters.
The demand for the MSP law specifically presses for mandating all purchases at or above an MSP of ‘C2+50%’, which refers to 50% over the total cost of production, where cost (called C2 in the formula) is calculated as all paid-out costs a farmer incurs in cash or kind on farm inputs, plus hired labour, cost of leased-in land, fuel, irrigation, etc; the notional interest on the value of owned capital assets like land, the notional rental value of such land; as well as the imputed value of family labour.
Current government calculations to fix MSP arrive at the cost of production through the A2+FL formula—all input costs plus unpaid family labour. MSP is set at 1.5 times this sum.
Other demands of the agitating farmers include the repeal of the National Policy Framework on Agriculture Marketing (NPFAM), denounced by farm unions across the country as being aligned with greater profits for corporates and multinational corporations, and as being a reincarnation of the three agri-marketing laws repealed in 2021.
The arrests and the anger against the Aam Aadmi Party-run Punjab state government, in addition to the Punjab farm unions’ prevailing mistrust of the Bharatiya Janata Party-led union government, serve as a flashpoint to continuing nationwide protests in the farm sector.
On 31 March, Punjab farmers staged protests outside the residences of various AAP ministers and MLAs; a nationwide village-bandh or shutdown call will be announced for 20 May, as well as an industrial strike. Leaders told Article 14 that the 20 May bandh and strike will be supported by a large federation of workers’ unions as well as the SKM and all its constituents including the Left parties and other groups.
The new phase of unrest reflects deep, systemic factors underlying India’s persistent agrarian distress—outstanding institutional debt for agriculture rose by 53% in six years between 2015-16 and 2020-21; over 60% of surveyed farmers found the climate crisis to have already reduced production and revenue; and farm income growth remains marginal or negative.
In 2016, Prime Minister Narendra Modi declared that a bevy of schemes would cause farm incomes to double by 2022, but while production of many commodities has been plentiful despite climate shocks, socio-economic distress among producers has persisted and remunerative farm incomes have remained elusive.
In the decade since the Narendra Modi government first took over, it has announced several success in Indian agriculture, including an overall buoyant annual growth at over 4% for the last five years.
Food grain production surged from 252 million tonnes in 2014-15 to 332 million tonnes in 2023-24, a 27% increase; while area under food grain crops grew over 6% from 124.3 million hectares in 2014-15 to 132.1 million hectares in 2023-24. This was possible due to a spurt in productivity, or yield per unit of land, which grew 19% for paddy, 13% for wheat, 25% for maize, and 71% for coarse cereals over this nine-year period.
Interest subsidies through Kisan Credit Card loans rose 2.4 times, from Rs 6,000 crore in 2014-15 to Rs 14,252 crore in 2023-24. Institutional credit flow to agriculture rose nearly three times since 2014-15, from Rs 8.5 lakh crore to Rs 25.48 lakh crore in 2023-24; short-term agriculture credit more than doubled, from Rs 6.4 lakh crore in 2014-15 to Rs 15.07 lakh crore in 2023-24.
Some finer details: fresh fruit production grew 97% from 2014-15 to 2023-24; crude palm oil production grew 105%; subsidies on fertilisers grew 174%; central assistance for micro-irrigation grew 232%; and area under micro-irrigation grew 133%.
Yet, by the government’s own admission, Indian farming households earn Rs 13,661 per month, less than $ 160.
Only 9.1% of farming households in India own a tractor; 5.4% owned a draught animal. Less than 5% of agricultural households owned a sprinkler or drip irrigation system, and only 0.5% owned a harvester. Less than a third owned a refrigerator, only 3.2% owned an air conditioner and 4.7% owned a car.
A Legally Assured Support Price
In February 2024, as talks between the farm unions and the government of India failed to make progress—farmers rejected the offer to procure some crops through a five-year contract—another march to Delhi was announced. On 21 February, two days after the farmers began to mobilise from Punjab and neighbouring Haryana, the state police in Haryana, a state ruled by the Bharatiya Janata Party, used force to push back the protestors. Tear-gas canisters were hurled, followed by water cannons and rubber bullets.
A 21-year-old man died in the violence; over a dozen were left wounded. Some with serious injuries claimed they had faced pellet guns, a charge denied by the Haryana police.
The government must acknowledge the price and income crises that farmers across the country have been facing in recent years, said Kohar, one of the leaders of the SKM (Non-Political), an umbrella group of farm unions, most of them from Punjab and Haryana. “The agitation from February 2024 has merely asked for what the government already promised in 2021 while rolling back the three laws,” Kohar told Article 14.
P R Pandian, co-ordinator of the SKM (NP) in Tamil Nadu, who was in the delegation that met a union government team in Chandigarh on 19 March before they were arrested, said union ministers Shivraj Singh Chouhan (agriculture) and Prahlad Joshi (consumer affairs, food and public distribution) appeared amenable that day to begin drafting a law, but union minister Piyush Goyal (commerce and industry) felt other stakeholders including traders should be consulted as well.
The farmer leaders were planning another round of talks before they were arrested. Pandian said he was aghast at the AAP government’s “anti-farmer, anti-democratic approach” .
Gaps Between Support Prices & Market
The Commission for Agricultural Costs and Prices (CACP) recommends MSPs for 23 commodities (MSP for 22 crops and a fixed remunerative price or FRP for sugar).
The commonly held notion that MSP is critical for farmers in Punjab and Haryana alone because their entire crop is lifted at government procurement centres year after year, at MSP, is erroneous, though procurement is indeed skewed on account of skewed procurement infrastructure.
Three states (Madhya Pradesh, Punjab, and Haryana) producing 46% of the wheat in the country account for 85% of its procurement, while six states (Punjab, Telangana, Andhra Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, and Haryana) that produce 40% of paddy have a 74% share in procurement.
The occurrence of market prices dipping significantly below MSP is so widespread (see here, here, here, here) that most farmers who do not have access to public procurement centres unquestioningly accept lower prices from private traders.
The issue is critical enough for union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan to say at a press conference on 27 March that state governments must ensure that no agricultural produce is purchased below MSP. (There is presently, however, no legal mechanism to enforce such a directive.)
Pandian pointed out that not only the National Commission on Farmers (commonly referred to as the Swaminathan Commission) that submitted its reports between 2004 and 2006, but also the parliamentary standing committee on agriculture, animal husbandry and food processing that submitted its latest report on 17 December 2024 had recommended introducing a legal guarantee for MSP—no trader may purchase these 23 commodities below their declared MSP.
Such a legally binding MSP would ensure financial stability for farmers, reduce incidence of farmer suicides, weaken the impact of market volatility on farmers and lighten their debt burdens, besides having positive outcomes on food security and farmers’ overall mental health, the standing committee report said.
“The truth of the delay in enacting this critical law is that the government’s will is missing,” said Raju Shetti, one of Maharashtra’s most prominent farmer leaders and former Lok Sabha Member of Parliament.
His own private member draft bill, moved in Parliament in 2018 and still pending, recommended legislating a price that would be imposed, not unlike the minimum wage law or even the FRP for sugar, a rate fixed and enforced by the government.
“The government will not need to procure all the produce,” Shetti told Article 14. “Nor will there be any impact on inflation.”
Founder of the Swabhimani Shetkari Sanghatana, Shetti, a two-term former MP, said a good parallel to draw is sugar, a commodity whose price has been controlled by the government for the past six to seven years, ending volatility of sugar prices and also ending traders’ profiteering during the off-season for sugar mills. “The farmers and the consumers are both happy,” he said, adding that while the same can be done for MSP, the middlemen in the agricultural markets would stand to lose.
Persistent Distress For Farmer Households
In the absence of remunerative prices and with market prices often controlled by private traders with deep pockets, farming is increasingly not a sustainable livelihood.
Data show that the average monthly income of a farmer household was Rs 10,218 in 2019, as per the National Statistical Office’s ‘situation assessment survey’ of agricultural households and land and livestock holdings of 2019, the results of which were released in 2021.
The government’s interpretation was that farm household incomes, estimated at Rs 6,426 per month in 2012-13, had grown to Rs 10,218 in 2018-19.
In 2024, the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) published the findings of its second all-India rural financial inclusion survey 2021-22, which said 57% of rural households in India still depend on agriculture for sustenance, and agricultural households had recorded an average monthly income of Rs 13,661, a little better than non-farm rural households, which earned Rs 11,438 per month.
This marked a 57.6% rise since the first rural financial inclusion survey in 2016-17, and the government of India interpreted it to be among “notable improvements in income, savings, insurance coverage and financial literacy”.
However, this income was not from farming alone. Indeed, 56% of agricultural households were working to maintain three or more sources of income, an adaptation strategy.
The sum of Rs 13,661 per month for farm households included income from farming, as well as from wage labour, lease rent from land or other property, from livestock/poultry, from non-farm businesses, interest or dividends on deposits or investments, etc. Rs 13,661 is a net income, after deducting expenses incurred towards pursuing income-generating activities.
Income from farming accounted for only 33% of agricultural households’ income, down from 35% in 2016-17; wage labour (including from rural jobs guarantee schemes, farm labour, skilled and unskilled non-farm labour) fell dramatically from 34% in 2016-17 to 16% in 2021-22; while income from government or private jobs grew from 16% to 23% over the five-year period.
In the same period, income from ‘other enterprises’ leaped from 6% to 15% in the same period. ‘Other enterprises’ included from all the new avenues that farmer households adopt to eke out a living, in the chronic absence of sustainable incomes from cultivation. These include, according to the NABARD survey, trading / shop-keeping /petty businesses; selling non-timber forest produce or other forestry products; fees from professional self-employment; and income from various micro or other enterprises involved in offering services or manufacturing activity.
The survey found this livelihood strategy to be more prevalent among small farmers. Government data shows that farmers owning less than 2 hectares of land now account for 89.4% of the total.
NABARD found 56% of agricultural households dependent on as many as three or more sources of income, compared to two-thirds of non-agricultural households living off a single income source.
Agricultural households reported a monthly consumption expenditure of Rs 11,710, leaving a slim balance of Rs 1,951 for discretionary expenses, emergencies or for savings.
Asked by NABARD’s surveyors if they were impacted by crisis events at any time in the five years preceding the survey, sizeable numbers mentioned health events/accidents, death of an earning member, loss of employment, all incidents that came with financial uncertainties which, more often than not, led to seeking loans to meet expenses.
Nearly 30% of surveyed agricultural households had faced crop failure due to rainfall irregularities, seasonal extremities such as cyclones or droughts, or pest infestations; 12% had faced problems due to fluctuations in the market price of crops; and 10% faced loss of livestock due to floods or diseases.
As much as 55% of agricultural households had outstanding loans, to the tune of Rs 91,231 on average—6.6 times their meagre household monthly income. Indebtedness was steeper in some states than the average, such as Telangana (92%), Andhra Pradesh (86%), Karnataka (79%) and Tamil Nadu (78%).
Nearly a quarter (23.4%) had loaned money only from non-institutional sources, and thus owed money lenders, landlords, market commission agents, traders, farm input suppliers, chit fund operators or relatives money at unregulated rates of interest.
By NABARD’s own assessment, indebtedness caused farmers to be forced to migrate, reorganise their expenditure priorities in order to service their debt, experience worsening mental health and, in extreme cases, pushed them to die by suicide.
Indebtedness parameters also worsened since the previous survey in 2016-17—overall indebtedness grew from 52.5% to 55% of agricultural households; Telangana had the highest incidence of farmer indebtedness in 2016-17 too, but at a lower percentage, 79% of farm households.
Farming Crisis In State After State
In the latter half of 2024, even as the protesting farmers in Punjab grew more restive, a slide in market prices affected paddy farmers in south India too, particularly in the Cauvery belt or southern India’s rice bowl.
Paddy production in the country fell marginally in 2023-24, followed by a rise in prices, also on account of the war in Ukraine. In 2024-25, however, a bumper crop has kept paddy price realisations low. In the foreign market, prices for top rice exporters in India fell to an 18-month low, on account of plentiful supplies and a depreciating rupee.
Rice reserves in state granaries, including unmilled paddy, reached a record 60.9 million metric tonnes in January 2025, eight times the government's target of 7.6 million tonnes, according to data compiled by the Food Corporation of India.
Pandian, the Tamil Nadu co-ordinator of the SKM (NP), said the loudest demand for a legally guaranteed MSP, which can only be legislated by Parliament, may come from Punjab’s unions, but the measure would benefit farmers across the country, including paddy as well as other farmers in Tamil Nadu.
Pandian told Article 14 that corruption in procurement centres in Tamil Nadu had caused many farmers to sell in the private market, at rates below MSP.
The bigger crisis in Tamil Nadu is the state government agreeing to the Centre’s demand to hand over foodgrain procurement to the National Cooperative Consumers’ Federation (NCCF) in a large part of the southern state. As the NCCF lacks its own procurement infrastructure such as storage warehouses and procurement centres, it would inevitably rope in private players.
Even through the Tamil Nadu Civil Supplies Corporation, state procurement of paddy is only about a third of the 12 million tonnes of paddy produced annually by Tamil Nadu’s farmers.
“The involvement of private players in procurement, which has until now been managed by the state government, could impact farmers adversely,” said Pandian, president of the Coordination Committee of All Farmers Associations of Tamil Nadu. Farmers across the state are willing to support longer agitations to press for the MSP law, he said, though a consensus is lacking among all the farm unions, including the SKM faction that has not participated in the current Punjab agitation.
The Tamil Nadu chapter of the SKM (NP) conducted a tractor rally on 26 January, after a token hunger strike in Chennai on 22 January to show solidarity with Dallewal, and to press for the MSP-guarantee law.
Elsewhere, in Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra, stagnant soybean prices have left farmers barely able to recover costs; in Telangana it was paddy prices that have disappointed farmers, particularly after considerable expenditure they incurred on protecting the crops from a very dry spell; tomato farmers in Telangana have found that a glut has caused prices to crash, to Rs 2 - Rs 6 per kg; while in Uttar Pradesh farmers are up in arms against land acquisition for industry at low land prices.
In Maharashtra, which accounts for over a third of farmer suicides across the country year after year, distress led 2,635 farmers to take their lives 2024; 2,851 in 2023; 2942 in 2022 and 2743 in 2021.
The state is home to a larger network of irrigation dams than any other state, but the efficiency of this irrigation system has been poor. Soybean farmers are finding prices well below MSP in the current marketing season, and at least 50% of surveyed cotton farmers had suffered crop loss due to floods and droughts in the past five years.
The Loan Waiver Carrot
In response to Maharashtra deputy chief minister’s comments around the state’s budget estimates for 2025-26 that no farm loan waiver will be possible in 2025 or 2026, Maratha reservation agitationist Manoj Jarange Patil threatened to direct farmers not to allow the ruling parties’ legislators into their villages, harking back to his call before the 2024 Lok Sabha election to prohibit entry of leaders who do not support the Maratha cause.
Farm leader Ajit Navale, Maharashtra state secretary of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and state general secretary of the CPM’s Kisan Sabha, said it was reprehensible that the BJP, Shiv Sena (Eknath Shinde) and the Nationalist Congress Party (Ajit Pawar) promised a loan waiver while campaigning for state assembly elections in November 2024, and then declared a waiver impractical upon being voted to power.
“This opportunistic politics at the cost of farmers must be opposed,” Navale told Article 14, days after he declared that the Kisan Sabha would burn bank loan recovery notices sent to farmers in a demonstration of protest.
Thirteen farm loan waiver schemes have been implemented in India since 2012, some states such as Maharashtra implementing more than one such waiver during this period. However, these programmes have neither stanched the losses nor suppressed calls for more bailout packages.
The demand for loan-waivers, now emerging from Maharashtra as well as Telangana and Tamil Nadu, despite record agricultural output and government claims of buoyant sectoral growth, underscores the deep-rooted structural crisis in Indian agriculture, Navale said.
“So long as income from cultivation falls and input costs become more expensive, and so long as natural calamities cause crop loss that is not adequately addressed by the crop insurance programme, poor agrarian policy will keep indebtedness growing,” Navale said. “Simultaneously, calls for loan waivers will also continue.”
(Kavitha Iyer is a senior editor with Article 14 and the author of ‘Landscapes of Loss’, a book on India’s farm crisis.)
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