Understanding Farmers’ Protests in India

Perspectives in Global Development Seminar Series: Spring 2022

No national occupational group in the world contains more people, or more poor people, than India’s agricultural sector, which recently saw massive farmers’ protests against three pieces of legislation recently passed by the Indian government. In this talk, I examine the grounds of the farmers' fears foregrounding these protests against the transformation of the Indian economy in recent years and the legacy of the Green Revolution in rice and wheat in the 1960s and 1970s. These protests were vilified by some and celebrated by others and came to represent something much larger than the farm laws themselves, contesting the increasing concentration of power and decision making at the federal level as opposed to the states. I conclude the talk with reflections on what lessons the year-long protests offer for policy making for agriculture in India.

About the speaker:

Sudha Narayanan is a Research Fellow, International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), New Delhi. She was previously an Associate Professor at the Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research (IGIDR), Mumbai. Sudha's research interests straddle agriculture, food and nutrition policy, and human development in India. She is particularly interested in survey-based research, using microeconometric approaches to understand broader questions of agrarian change and state delivery systems for food and nutrition security. Her current projects focus on agricultural value chains in India and Bangladesh, agritech interventions and farmer producer organizations in India. Sudha has published extensively in high impact journals within India, a strategy that reflects her strong preference for high quality action-oriented research. She has also written for popular dailies such as Mint, The Hindu, Business Line and the Economic Times and has featured in global media outlets such as The Washington Post, BBC World, Deutsche Welle, etc. Her academic work has also been published in international peer-reviewed journals. Narayanan holds a PhD in agricultural economics from Cornell University and MPhil and M.A. degrees in economics from the Delhi School of Economics, India. In the past, she has worked with the Institute of Economic Growth in India, Cornell University and the Right to Food Campaign in India, where she provided research support to the Commissioners appointed by the Supreme Court of India to monitor the implementation of orders issued in connection with the Right to Food case.

About the seminar series

The Perspectives in Global Development seminars are held Wednesdays from 12:25 – 1:15 p.m. eastern time during the semester. The series will be presented in a hybrid format with some speakers on campus and others appearing via Zoom. Students, faculty and the general public are welcome to attend. The series is co-sponsored by the Department of Global Development, the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment, the Charles H. Dyson School of Applied Economics and Management, and the School of Integrative Plant Science as part of courses IARD 6960, NTRES 6960, PLSCS 6960 and AEM 6960.