Sept 27, 2021: Indian farmers who oppose reforms, saying their livelihoods are in jeopardy, aim to renew their pressure on the government by staging nationwide protests a year after the introduction of legislation to liberalise the sector.

For the past 10 months, thousands of farmers have been camping on major highways around the capital, New Delhi, to protest against the laws in a long-running farmers’ protest against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government. Farmers’ groups announced their new commitment to protest on Monday.

This month, more than 500,000 farmers attended a rally in the most populous state of Uttar Pradesh, the largest ever in the protest campaign, to put pressure on the Modi administration to repeal the laws.

The legislation, introduced in September last year, deregulates the agricultural sector and allows farmers to sell to buyers outside government-regulated wholesale markets, where farmers are assured of a minimum price.

Small farmers say the changes put them at risk of competing with big business, and that they could eventually lose support for prices for staples such as wheat and rice.

The government says the reforms mean new opportunities and better prices for farmers.

According to Abhimanyu Kohar of the Samyukt Kisan Morcha or the Joint Farmers Front the Modi government “has not been listening to the farmers for 10 months and has been ignoring the protests”.

“So we have given the call for ‘Bharat Bandh’ (pan-India strike) so that every group, classes, young and old farmers, and traders unite against the policy of the present government.”

In Kohar’s assessment, the government claims the protests are limited to two or three opposition states but in reality though, Monday’s protests enjoy popular support even in the states governed by Modi’s ruling BJP, including Haryana, Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka.

As a vital sector of India’s economic engine, farming sustains almost half of India’s more than 1.3 billion people and accounts for about 15 percent of the mega $2.7 trillion economy.

In response to a concern by that the protests may cause damage to some aspects of every day life, farmer union leaders assured their protests would not disrupt emergency services.

Over the past one year since the laws were enacted, the protests have been generally peaceful but in January this year, police and farmers clashed in New Delhi during a tractor procession killing one protester and injuring more than 80 police personnel.

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