
After a year of sustained protests by farmers, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has conceded to their demands and said his government would repeal farm laws that his government had enacted to overhaul the country’s agricultural sector.
It was not in dispute that India’s previous system, which incentivized farmers to grow a huge surplus of grains, needed to be fixed. The protesters feared that the haste with which the laws were passed and the breadth of the changes they involved would send crop prices plunging. Mr. Modi’s government had argued that introducing market forces would help fix the system.
back to their villages. For years, debts and bankruptcies have been driving farmers to high rates of suicide.