A farmer along with workers from Shiromani Akali Dal party participate in a march for farmers to protest against the recent passing of agriculture reform bills in the Parliament, in Amritsar on October 1, 2020
When the test came, Modi’s BJP won in a landslide. One year later, the Modi government finally responded to farmers’ concerns with structural reforms intended to permanently raise agricultural incomes by giving farmers access to better prices from wider markets beyond their home districts—that is, with the 2020 farm acts.
At the center of the controversy are Modi’s three new farm laws. The first allows farmers to sell their produce outside their local area if they think they can get a better price than that offered by their local government-run markets. The second allows farmers to engage in contract farming by selling their produce in advance—a widespread practice in the West but sensitive in India because of the potential for abuse.
Jats make up a relatively small proportion of India’s total population, but their concentration in Haryana and Punjab, and their association with the land, makes them locally powerful in these two states. Modern democratic India does not report population data by caste, but Hindu Jats are believed to constitute roughly one-quarter of the population of Haryana, while Sikh Jats make up a little more than one-fifth of the population of Punjab.
More than 90 percent of their cropland is covered by heavily subsidized irrigation. And the government buys almost the entire output of Punjab and Haryana farmers at minimum support prices that are set far above market levels. The results are huge and growing official stockpiles of wheat and rice, much of which ends up being given away to the country’s poor—or simply rotting in place.
India’s poorest farmers need the reforms because most of them do not have access to the high levels of government subsidies that benefit the larger-scale Jat farmers of Haryana and Punjab. Forced to sell to local middlemen at spot prices, they lack options for marketing their produce outside their home districts. They also lack access to financing and futures markets, management tools that most Western farmers take for granted.
Here in Nigeria the reverse is the case, instead of them helping the poor they would rather hike the price of their products to increase more hardship. Mad people in this contraption called Nigeria