The Setup: Farming, Punjab, and Why Land Is Life

Kissan Andolan — The Complete Story · Part 1 of 12 · by Lovepreet Singh

Before you can understand a fight, you have to understand what people are fighting over. This whole story is about one thing: farming — and the people whose entire lives hang on it.

In this part

• The whole story in one breath
• First, meet the Indian farmer
• Why does this story begin in Punjab?
• The Green Revolution — the miracle that changed everything
• How Punjab became India's food bowl
• The hidden price of the miracle
• Debt — the quiet weight on every shoulder
• The heartbreak behind the numbers
• Why land is not just land
• So here is where the story begins

Before you can understand a fight, you have to understand what people are fighting over. This whole story is about one thing: farming — and the people whose entire lives hang on it. 1 The whole story in one breath Let me give you the entire story in a single paragraph. Then we will slow down and understand it piece by piece. The whole thing, in one breath In 2020, India's government passed three new farming laws. Millions of farmers — most of them from Punjab and nearby states — believed these laws would slowly kill the safety net that keeps them alive and hand farming over to big companies. So they marched to the capital, Delhi, and sat at its borders for more than a year, through winter, heat, and a pandemic. It became one of the largest and longest protests in human history. In late 2021 the government finally cancelled the laws. But the farmers' deeper problems were never solved — so…

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