The Farm Laws of 2020 & Their Repeal

Imagine a government passing three genuinely major agricultural reform laws. The goals were to let farmers sell their produce outside the traditional APMC mandi system, explained elsewhere on this site, to allow more contract farming, also explained elsewhere on this site, and to loosen the rules on how much of a crop traders could stockpile. Now imagine those same laws being completely cancelled just fourteen months later, after one of the largest, most sustained farmer protests in Indian history.

This is exactly what happened with India's three farm laws. They were passed in September 2020 and repealed, meaning officially cancelled, in November 2021.

The government's stated goal was genuine: give farmers more freedom in where and how they sell their crops, instead of being tied to the regulated APMC mandi system. This direction was broadly in line with what many economists had recommended for years.

But farmers strongly opposed the laws, not because they were against having more choice in general, but because of one specific, genuine fear. They worried that weakening APMC mandis would eventually weaken the MSP procurement system too, since MSP, explained elsewhere on this site, is largely delivered through those same mandis. If that happened, farmers feared being left exposed to unpredictable open-market prices and the negotiating power of large private buyers, with no adequate safety net in place.

The protests lasted more than a year. They were led mainly by farmers from Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh. Eventually, the government repealed all three laws in November 2021. This is a genuinely rare event: a major economic reform being fully cancelled after it was already passed into law. It remains a lasting reminder that reforming Indian agriculture requires building farmer trust, and navigating political realities, that go well beyond just having sound economic logic behind a reform.