Over the past thirty years, India’s neoliberal economic turn has had dreadful consequences for the livelihood of agrarian communities and the rural poor. The country’s ruling elites have imposed trade liberalization policies, slashed state expenditure and subsidies for farming, and weakened public procurement systems. There is a general trend towards corporatization of the agricultural sector, with corporate agribusiness not only determining the prices of inputs and outputs but seeking control of the entire production, value addition, and marketing processes.

Since the neoliberal economic reforms that were inaugurated in 1991, communities dependent on agriculture have experienced continuous pauperization. The share of India’s farm-dependent population in the country’s population as a whole fell from 59 percent in 1991 to 54.6 percent in 2011 and 45.6 percent in 2019–20. The proportion of cultivators in the farm-dependent population decreased from 59.7 percent in 1991 to 45.1 percent in 2011.

Already before the pandemic in 2019, the average figure for outstanding loans per agricultural household was 74,121 Indian rupees (about $1,000 — more than half the median income in India that year). The situation has grown worse since then, with all sections of the Indian peasantry and rural poor suffering huge losses in income. The agrarian crisis is so acute that at least thirty farm-dependent people commit suicide each day. Every fifteen minutes, another farmer abandons agriculture.