By GARRET ROBINSON
Staff Writer
For over a week now tens of thousands of farmers in India have blocked highways and barricaded the streets of New Delhi, which is India’s capital, and other cities due to new agricultural laws that are being passed. The Indian government wants to deregulate agriculture, and encourage farmers to sell directly to certain companies. These farmers don’t make much but they get a minimum guarantee from the government who buys the crops and supplies the nation, but now with these new laws, the farmers are getting worried that they will get paid even less than they already are. One of the protesters stated, “This sector is not just neglected, but deliberately ignored and underestimated because of the present paradigm of development, which is not just market-oriented but consumerism-based… we want production by the masses-as Gandhi said-not mass production”. India’s Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, wants to modernize and industrialize his country but a lot of the farmers who live in agricultural provinces of India such as Punjab, Haryana, and Uttar Pradesh feel like they are being let down by their own government and nation, even though they helped India become a more self-sufficient country in terms of food production.
