More than 200 farmers demonstrated near India’s Parliament to mark eight months of protests against agricultural laws on Thursday in New Delhi. They will devastate their livelihoods.
- Farmers staged a sit-in near parliament on Thursday to urge the government to repeal the legislation they claim threatens their future.
- The protesters waving white, green, and orange flags arrived in police-escorted buses from an expressway outside New Delhi. Thousands of farmers have hunkered down since late November to voice their anger against three laws passed by Parliament last year.
- New Delhi police escorted hundreds of farmers as they arrived in the capital to a protest site in the city center on Thursday morning. Some protesters accused the police of tightening security at the demonstration site and checking identity cards before their arrival.
- India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government says the agriculture laws are necessary to modernize the industry. Still, farmers say they will leave them poorer and at the mercy of big corporations.
- Nearly after a couple of rounds of talks with Agriculture Minister Narendra Singh Tomar since December, it has failed to break the stalemate. Tomar on Thursday said he was prepared to resume talks on amending the laws with the farmers but did not indicate accepting their main demand for repealing them.
More than half of India’s 1.3 billion people are agriculture employees, but shrinking earnings mean it now accounts for only 15% of India’s economy. Failed harvests force poor farmers to borrow money at high-interest rates to buy seeds, fertilizer, and food for their cattle. They often mortgage their land and, as debts mount, some are driven to suicide.
