AS BKU EKTA DAKAUNDA AND OTHER FARM UNIONS MOBILISE FOR A SEPTEMBER 1 PROTEST — THE NUMBERS BEHIND THE ANGER, AND THE STAKES OF GETTING THE RESPONSE WRONG
Later this month, farmers across Punjab's districts will gather in gurdwaras and union halls to plan what comes next. Ludhiana's Block Rupana units are due at Gurdwara Tahli Sahib, Raikot, on August 24. Similar meetings are happening in every district under instruction from the state committee of BKU Ekta Dakaunda. The goal: a coordinated seven-day protest beginning September 1, targeting land revenue (lagaan), and, if reports from other unions hold, converging with a much larger multi-union mobilisation expected in Chandigarh the same day.
To an outside observer, it can look like Punjab's farmers are perpetually on the march. In truth, they are — and understanding why requires looking past any single grievance to a structure that has been straining for decades, even as India's food security position has, on paper, never looked stronger.
A System Under Genuine Pressure. The average Indian farm holding is small and getting smaller — fragmented across generations of inheritance until scale becomes nearly impossible. Input costs for fertiliser, diesel and seed have in many years outpaced what farmers earn for their crops. Minimum Support Price (MSP), the government's guaranteed floor price, functions reliably only for wheat and rice — and largely in states like Punjab and Haryana that built the infrastructure around it during the Green Revolution. Everywhere else, and for every other crop, farmers are far more exposed to open-market price swings.
That exposure feeds a debt cycle that has defined rural Punjab for a generation. Farmers borrow against uncertain harvests; formal bank credit is often difficult to access at the moment it's needed, particularly around sowing season; informal moneylenders fill the gap at steep cost. This is not a new story, and it is not confined to one government's tenure — but it is the soil in which every protest movement since the early 2000s has grown, and it explains why "release of pending crop loans" and "immediate clearance of arrears" recur in almost every union statement, regardless of the specific policy under dispute in a given year.
Layered on top of the economic grievance is a trust deficit. The 2020-21 farm laws, which sought to deregulate agricultural markets, were repealed after more than a year of sustained protest — but they left farm unions convinced that reform, when it comes from Delhi or Chandigarh, tends to arrive without adequate protection for the smallholder. That suspicion now attaches itself to newer proposals, including Punjab's revived Land Pooling Policy, which unions have characterised as a disguised land acquisition scheme for urban development rather than a genuine partnership with landowners. Whether or not that characterisation is fair in every instance, the pattern of promises made in the heat of a protest and not fully honoured afterward — a specific complaint raised by BKU (Kadian) leadership ahead of the September 1 action — is what keeps mobilisation levels high even in years without a single dramatic flashpoint.
Food Security: The Other Half of the Story. Set against this is a genuinely strong national picture. India is largely self-sufficient in its staple grains, and that self-sufficiency has become a deliberate policy tool: when global food prices spike, New Delhi can and does restrict rice, wheat and sugar exports to shield the domestic market — a lever few food-importing nations possess. The result has been a domestic food price trajectory that has, for long stretches, moved independently of global markets, and in India's favour.
That divergence is visible again this year. Global food prices climbed to a three-year high by July 2026, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's price index pushed up by cereals, vegetable oils and sugar amid conflict in the Gulf and Black Sea regions and extreme weather affecting production. India's domestic food inflation, by contrast, spent late 2025 in negative territory — outright deflation — before climbing back through the year: roughly 2% in January, crossing 5.5% by July. That July figure is a real uptick, and forecasters expect further pressure into the festival season on items like sugar and rice, but it remains comfortably inside the Reserve Bank of India's 2-6% tolerance band, and nowhere near the double-digit food inflation spells India has weathered in the past.
This is not a small achievement. Food security at national scale — the ability to keep grocery bills broadly stable for over a billion people even as war and weather disrupt global supply chains — depends directly on the productive capacity of Indian farmers and on stockpiles built from their harvests. It is difficult to overstate how much of that stability rests on a system that simultaneously leaves individual farmers under-compensated.
Where the Two Goals Meet — and Collide. This is the crux of the policy problem, and it's worth stating plainly: India's food security has, to a significant degree, been subsidised by underpaid farm labour and underpriced farm risk. Export restrictions that keep consumer prices low domestically also mean farmers are cut off from better prices available on the international market during exactly the periods — like now — when global demand is strongest. Free or heavily subsidised electricity for groundwater irrigation has helped guarantee the wheat-and-rice output that anchors national food stocks, but it has done so by driving Punjab's water table toward crisis, a bill that will eventually come due for the very farmers currently protesting.
None of this is to say the government's balancing act is malicious or even mistaken in its broad strategic aims — insulating over a billion consumers from global food shocks is a legitimate and largely successful policy. But it is reasonable to observe that the insulation has been achieved partly by transferring risk onto the farming population rather than absorbing it through better-funded, better-designed protections. A system this dependent on farmers producing reliably, at scale, and largely on demand, has an obligation to treat the risk they carry with more than seasonal announcements and post-protest concessions.
What Durable Protections Could Look Like. Serious proposals — from unions and from economists sympathetic to farmers — tend to cluster around a few ideas that would strengthen both farmer livelihoods and the food security system they underpin, rather than trading one against the other: income support decoupled from crop choice; a legally credible MSP on a strategic basket of crops rather than an unfunded promise across everything; genuine diversification support, funded for long enough that switching crops isn't a gamble; water and power pricing reform paired with a transition cushion; and faster, fairer formal credit to break reliance on informal moneylenders.
None of these are radical. Versions of most have been piloted somewhere in India already. What has been missing is sustained funding and, just as importantly, enough follow-through that farm unions have reason to trust the next announcement more than the last one.
The Stakes of September 1. Whatever specific demands dominate the coming protest, the underlying argument from Punjab's farm unions is consistent and, on the evidence, not unreasonable: the system currently asks a great deal of them in exchange for a national food security achievement they rarely get credited for, and rarely get compensated to match. A food-secure India and a genuinely prosperous farming class are not competing goals. But they will keep colliding in the streets of Chandigarh every few months for as long as policy treats farmer protection as a concession to be negotiated under pressure, rather than a foundation the entire system is quietly built on.
Jan Shakti News will continue coverage of the September 1 protest and district-level preparatory meetings as they develop.
