 You're watching News Made Easy, I'm Nandio Chakravarty. Today I'm going to ask a very strange question and that is who were the farm laws meant for? Was it meant for the farmer or was it meant for the business person? You know these farm laws that were bulldozed through parliament by PM Modi and the BJP and they have now been cancelled. They're going to be repealed in the winter session. My answer is that these farm laws were actually not meant for the farmer. They were meant for big business. They were meant for big business and you'll ask me why. The reason for that is that in the past few years India has been facing a major demand problem. And because of that, 4 out of 10 machines in India's factories have been sitting idle. Capacity utilization is very low and when you have so many machines that are sitting idle why would you invest more? Why would you want to produce more, build more capacities when you can't even sell what you already produced? What you can already produce? So India Inc has been facing what one would call a problem of investment. They have nowhere to invest. What are the options open to them? The option number one is of course to look at the export market and we know that's not easy because China is sitting there, a huge giant which has developed these export markets for many, many years and then there are these low value, no margin goods which have been produced by the Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Vietnam where India Inc is not actually very interested because the margins are pretty low there. The volumes have to be very high. It's not a space to be in, all right. And the second option that India Inc has is to look for a sector where there is still domestic demand that they can sell goods to Indian consumers, right. And what better I think and that there be if you can combine the two what if you can both get domestic demand and also get an export market where can that be and that is agriculture, right. Because agriculture till now big business has been kind of barred from entering it for about 73 years, right. It's only now that they were allowed to enter that space and what the farm laws did for big business which have now been cancelled and will be repealed, right. They would have allowed big business companies to produce crops not for the domestic market but for exports, things that foreigners would want to buy. And you know they don't have to care about food security of India, they care only about profit. And the second thing that they would have wanted to do is that the 5-7% of relatively affluent people in India they wanted to control the agricultural market and distribution and retail for them. These are the two great opportunities that agriculture provides for big business, alright. And what are the Modi government's calculations? The Modi government's calculations were that if these farm bills are pushed through poor farmers, right. Poor farmers will support these farm bills. Why? Because the assumption was that you know poor farmers generally they don't get minimum support price. About 5-10% of farmers actually end up getting minimum support price. And therefore they would have actually had no problem if this market had been opened up and big business allowed to enter. It would have not really made a difference to them. There was another assumption that poor farmers will want to oppose rich farmers and oppose the traders, the grain traders, the Arathiyas. They would want to get rid of them because they are oppressors, exploiters in the countryside. Well, but these ended up being Modi government's miscalculation and why am I saying that? Because poor farmers do not get MSP but the government's own assessment data of agricultural production tells us that a large number of poor farmers do know about MSP, about minimum support price. And they also understand that wherever MSP is given, farmers are richer, right. We know that in Punjab, procurement is higher than what the Punjab farmer actually produces. Why? Because farmers from western UP and other states end up going to Punjab and selling their produce at MSP because it's not available. They can't sell it at MSP in their own states, right. And another thing that they realize is that when one looks at the crops which are sold at minimum support price, those crops actually have a more or less stable pricing. So you can, a farmer can kind of, even if they're not being able to sell it to a government procurement agency, they can expect a stable price for those products which is paddy or rice and wheat. Other products where there is no minimum support price, the prices fluctuate all the time. They could be very high and they could be so low that the farmer has to completely dump their crop. So even poor farmers, they want MSP. And that is why we saw how poor and rich farmers across India, especially in Punjab and Haryana, but actually all across India, united to oppose these pro-cooperate farm laws and demand MSP, which they're continuing to demand. And then the elections were coming up. So the feedback system must have told the BJP that there is resentment, not just in the small number of rich farmers and agricultural grain traders, but also amongst the middle and poor farmers. And that is why one could assume and report commentators are saying that PM Modi has withdrawn these farm laws right before two crucial elections with the Pradesh and Punjab. So that is one of the key reasons why the farm laws got defeated because the poor farmers did not think that the farming laws are good for them. And the poor farmers also realized that they are going to lose out in the long run. That's the show today. Keep watching NewsClick. Do subscribe to us, like this video and also share it as much as you can.