On the endemic contradictions in India’s path to modernisation of agriculture

T he agrarian crisis in India is not, as is often suggested, an outcome of institutional apathy or incompetence. These laws, which ostensibly seek to “reform” agricultural marketing, serve to open new avenues of profit for big capital and the upper sections of the rural agrarian classes at the cost of large sections of the peasantry, workers, and small capital in retail supply chains. Once this private procurement channel is in place, the denotification of APMC applied to the sub-market storage warehouses would open them up for integration into corporate retail supply chains. Regions that are already part of integrated supply chains offer natural habitats for big capital to make gains in retail, while the backwardness of other regions poses a significant barrier without adequate incentives stemming from the production side to overcome them. In short, these reforms, far from alleviating the ailments of the agrarian crisis, are likely to aggravate the entrenched structural contradictions that give rise to it, intensifying social and regional inequalities, imposing deflationary tendencies, and consequently imposing limits to progress in agricultural production and in suppressing demand—all for the purpose of immediate profits for big capital in retail.