The Farm Laws of 2020: Why Modi Introduced Them and Later Repealed Them

Rarely does an Indian government reverse a major legislative decision entirely. In November 2021, Modi’s government did exactly that, repealing three farm laws it had passed just over a year earlier. This article covers what those laws changed, why farmers protested so intensely, and why the government ultimately withdrew them.

What the Laws Changed

The three farm laws, passed in September 2020, aimed to deregulate significant parts of India’s agricultural marketing system, lifting long-standing government supervision over crop sales and, for the first time, allowing farmers to sell directly to private buyers and corporations outside the traditional government-regulated wholesale markets known as mandis, according to NPR’s coverage of the reform and subsequent repeal. The government’s stated rationale framed this as a modernising market reform, intended to give farmers more selling options and, in theory, better prices through increased competition for their produce.

Why Farmers Pushed Back

Farmer opposition centred on two connected concerns. First, many farmers feared that removing government oversight of crop sales would leave them more exposed to large corporate buyers with considerably more market power and negotiating leverage than individual farmers or small farming cooperatives could match. Second, and arguably more central to the protests, farmers wanted the existing Minimum Support Price system, a government-guaranteed floor price for specific crops, written explicitly into law and better enforced, along with an expansion of MSP-covered crops beyond the 22 staple crops it currently applied to, a guarantee the new laws didn’t provide and which protesting farmer groups argued left them without adequate protection once the sector opened up to unregulated private buyers.

A Year of Sustained Protest

The resulting protest movement, running from September 2020 through November 2021, became, in the assessment of one analyst cited by NPR, one of the largest civil disobedience campaigns in India since independence, with tens of thousands of farmers, disproportionately from Punjab and Haryana, camping for months at protest sites on the outskirts of Delhi despite harsh weather conditions and, at various points, direct confrontation with police.

The Repeal and Apology

On November 19, 2021, Modi announced the laws would be repealed, in an address that included an unusually direct personal apology, stating, according to NPR’s translation of his remarks, “I apologize to the people of the country with a true and pure heart. There must have been some deficiency in our efforts that we could not convince some farmers.” The Union Cabinet subsequently approved the formal repeal bill, and Parliament passed it in the following weeks.

The Political Timing

Political analysts at the time widely connected the timing of the repeal to upcoming state elections in agriculturally significant states, particularly Uttar Pradesh and Punjab, where the ongoing farmer protests were seen as a genuine electoral liability for BJP, a reading the government did not explicitly confirm but which most political commentary treated as the primary practical driver behind an unusually rare full legislative reversal.

Why This Episode Stands Out

Beyond the specific policy question, this episode is notable within Modi’s broader political record specifically because full policy reversals of this kind, especially accompanied by a direct personal apology, have been rare across his tenure, making the farm laws repeal one of the clearest examples of sustained public protest producing a complete legislative retreat during his time in office.

The Human Cost of the Protest Period

The scale of the year-long demonstration also carried a significant human toll that’s worth including in a complete account. Multiple protest-linked deaths were reported over the course of the year-long agitation, attributed variously to the harsh winter conditions at the Delhi border protest sites, road accidents connected to the ongoing demonstrations, and, in some reported cases, protester suicides linked to the prolonged economic and personal strain of the standoff, according to contemporaneous reporting on the movement collected in the House of Commons Library’s briefing on the episode, underscoring that the protest’s significance extended well beyond its eventual political and legislative outcome.

What Happened to the Underlying MSP Demand

It’s worth noting that while the three specific laws were repealed, the farmers’ broader demand for a legally guaranteed Minimum Support Price system was not itself written into law as part of the repeal, with the government instead setting up a separate committee to examine that specific question going forward, meaning the repeal resolved the immediate protest crisis without fully resolving the underlying policy demand that had helped drive it in the first place, a distinction farmer groups have continued to highlight in the years since.

What Happened to Farming Policy After the Repeal

In the years following the repeal, the government has continued to periodically raise Minimum Support Prices for various crops through its existing administrative mechanisms, the approach that predated the 2020 laws, rather than through any new comprehensive legislative framework, meaning the specific policy question that triggered the original protests, whether India’s agricultural marketing system needs a legally binding MSP guarantee or a more market-oriented structure, has effectively reverted to the pre-2020 status quo rather than being resolved definitively in either direction.

Bottom Line

The 2020 farm laws aimed to deregulate India’s agricultural markets but ran into sustained, large-scale farmer opposition centred on inadequate price-guarantee protections, a year-long protest that ended in November 2021 with a full repeal and a personal apology from Modi, one of the most significant policy reversals of his premiership.

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Abhyudaya Verma