Farm Protests Reflect India’s Worst Failing: A Broken Farmer-State Contract By Deepanshu Mohan and Jignesh Mistry

….a broken farmer-state relationship has been one of independent India’s worst failings and is a vital contributor in breeding widespread rural-urban inequalities – in terms of both (limiting) incomes, aspirations, and opportunities for the citizenry….

Farmers have often found it difficult to get their main produce sold at a fair, market price at a place of proximity. Their cropping pattern and choice on ‘what to produce’ is conditioned by a string of factors that are less grounded in commercial, market principles, but are sourced more in conditions of political levering (around MSPs), poor market-infrastructure, high costs of production, and entrenched middlemen-based price interventions….

The prevailing governmentality is embedded in a monolithic command style order of functioning, where law (and its institutions) is simply used as a tool of enforcement-at-all-cost against all, irrespective of who’s at the receiving end.

https://thewire.in/agriculture/farm-protests-india-worst-failing-broken-farmer-state-contract