This Monday, March 12, thousands of farmers from India’s western Maharashtra region walked over one hundred miles to the state capital in Mumbai. Their aim, laid out by an agricultural association closely allied with the Communist Party of India (CPI), was to demand government support for the farmers who comprise the country’s largest labor force.
Waving communist party flags and donning red berets, marchers arrived in the capital near midnight in an attempt to minimize traffic disruption. The location of the march was strategically chosen, however, since many multinational companies and India’s central bank are headquartered in the Mumbai city center. According to the CPI estimates, the protest swelled from 35,000 to 50,000 participants throughout the day. Waving communist party flags and donning red berets,
Tens of thousands of protesters, many of them elderly, were spurred to action by the state government’s failure to implement a comprehensive loan-waiver initiative. Indian farmers rely on interest-heavy “crop loans” to buy essential materials like seeds, fertilizer, and pesticides. Last year, the Indian government announced a plan to buy out debt and waive existing loans. Despite claiming to have submitted the proper paperwork, many marchers reported that they had not received a waiver. The program initially promised 340 billion rupees ($5.23 billion) in relief funds.
Also their list of demands was a commitment on the government’s part to purchase staple crops like grain cotton for one-and-a-half times their production cost. The Indian government sets food prices to stabilize incomes and incentivize production.
The farmers’ association also demanded that tribal farmers, who mainly cultivate ancestral forest plots, be granted full land rights.“For three generations my family has cultivated crops on a two acre-plot, but we still don’t own it,” a 74 year-old woman named Murabhai Bhavar told Reuters.“The land we till should be registered in our name.”
According to the BBC, the march was the second major agricultural protest in less than a year. Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India’s ruling Bhartiya Janata party has pushed a globally expansionist, neoliberal economic platform and rejected the country’s former policy of state-incentivized industrialization. Although the approach has dramatically bolstered India’s global economic standing, it has been accused of ambivalence toward the struggles of the working poor.
Lack of modern equipment, labor depletion, and severe drought have crippled Indian agriculture over the past several decades. Although agriculture is India’s largest industry, employing nearly 50% of its labor force, it supplies only 15% of the country’s GDP. Farmer suicides also account for nearly twelve percent of the country’s overall suicide rate, a statistic that many attribute to factors such as monsoon damage, high debt, and and exploitative governmental policies. In 2014, the Indian National Crime Records Bureau reported 5,650 farmer suicides.
The protesters met with state representatives, including Chief Minister Devendra Fadnavis, who assured them that 138 billion rupees of the promised amount have already been transferred to needy farmers and that all forest land disputes will be resolved within six months. “We are sad that farmers have come all the way to protest,” Fadnavis told NDTV. He said that the new wishlist would be reviewed. The state government also arranged for the farmers to travel home by train once talks were complete.
Carina is a senior double majoring in writing and communiation.