Was in a discussion with someone about the @dhume article. That person is of the opinion that it is paid news or govt propaganda.

IMO the reality is worse. It is ignorant. This is a business journo with no real access to agri insight.

Agriculture looks very different on paper. It is not enough to look at only facts familiar from a business perspective. "private investment is good" "reform is necessary"

Reform may be necessary, but what reform? To address what problems? To serve what goals?

Unlike most other businesses that are mostly in general agreement over what constitutes 'good' with govt, agriculture is often in contrast and for good reasons.

It is a complicated relationship that can't be analyzed with select business facts alone.

While farmers don't make fair profits, they are actually the ones subsidizing the food for everyone. Including rich people. Govt needs the food production. Farmers need the income security.

Private investors can't guarantee income security. They are businesses, not samaj seva.

Agriculture is risky in terms of income. You plant something now, you get return after months and you can't predict those conditions beforehand.

Dealing with elected representatives is security. Dealing with private entities who owe them nothing adds risk. Farmers won't like.

All the utopia of options and etc from the farm laws is if you are govt and get to shrug off some responsibility or if you're private company with new business possibilities opened.

What's in it for the farmer? Business journalist doesn't even think there's that angle.

Conspiracy theorists like to think there is a giant conspiracy somewhere that makes people drop their lives and go live on roads for months like it is some honeymoon at Shimla being paid for leftists or international conspirators or whatever.

Plain human logic tells you nope.

This is the logic of dehumanization. The same thinking that goes "dalits get admissions if they even pass" like they don't study to achieve. Here you have "farmers oppose laws that are good for them" like farmers don't know their own business and live to frustrate you.

The more the farmers perceive the govt as abandoning responsibility toward them the greater the mistrust will be. Add to that the demonizing of protests, violence.... this is not how differences are resolved.

Business analysis can't understand or fix this. Survival.

Then comes the match fixing. Where the buy-in of farmers is not even an objective. The rest of the country is convinced that farmers are the problem.

They burn stubble, they use fertilizers, they deplete groundwater, they collude with international conspiracies against India...

The arguments have no weight and fall apart on scrutiny. But they also count on people being too ignorant to examine them and see through them.

There is only one problem. The farmers aren't buying it. And we do need food. And politicians like votes....

So. Mexican stand off.

The down side of exploiting people of everything they have is that when they choose to fight you, they have nothing to lose.

Farmers are at that point. They CANNOT survive economically with these laws, so failing and going back isn't an option. Govt can't win this.

This problem would have been avoided with consultations, but I guess the govt and the cronies wanted their own agendas met and thought they could bulldoze farmers into compliance.

Well..... that calculation hasn't worked out.

And that is the problem with the article. It misses an entire side of the picture.

Worse, it falls for the WA forward grade arguments and fails to analyze.

Not malicious. Simply oblivious.

"Business" or govt may see the farmers as an inconvenience, but lakhs of people do not aspire to be someone's inconvenience at great hardship to self. Their motivations are real and invisible to the article.