“Nobody wants to live in the village.” A short answer by a veteran farmer to my longish question in Yavatmal’s Bhamb Raja, once projected as a model village, summed up the story of the first quarter of this century. “Those who can’t leave the village, must continue to suffer — like me,” he went on.
Bhamb has had its share of suicides over 25 years since the onset of distress in the farm sector coinciding with the restructuring of the Indian economy post-globalisation. Big companies descended on it with genetically-modified cotton seeds, promising hefty yields. Agro-chemical corporates followed with new pesticides and insecticides. Promises of higher income, higher yields, assured irrigation, better life turned out to be a mirage. Indebtedness grew. So did their desperation to get a modest life. Over the years, Bhamb wanted, and failed, to wriggle out of the rot.
In the last 25 years, half the village moved out in streams. The youth don’t want to farm; no one will marry them. They are unable to find alternative employment and must compete with better-educated, fast-moving, highly-skilled, and well-networked urban peers. Big farmers want to sell off their lands and move out. If the Maharashtra countryside is struggling, imagine the state of peasant classes in rural Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar and other poorer states.
If the first quarter of this century has been devastating for the countryside — nearly 450,000 farm suicides, rural-urban distress migration, high indebtedness — how does the next one bode? The future of millions of small, family farmers is no longer a marginal policy concern; it is a test of how we confront inequality, climate change, and unfair markets, and of whether our food systems will remain socially, ecologically, and economically viable in a warming world.
The World Inequality Lab says the top 1% of Indians capture 22.6% of national income and own roughly 40% of total wealth. The bottom 50, which comprises rural peasantry of all castes and creeds, barely receive 15% of the total income.
Now consider where farming sits within this unequal economy. Agriculture still supports around 40-50% of the workforce and contributes about 16-18% of the GDP. Most farmers have no allied incomes, far less any share in the services, the highest contributor to GDP. Different surveys indicate dwindling per-acre returns, and labour wage overtaking income from farming. Recent banking data reports show non-performing assets in the agriculture sector rising.
When crops fail, repayment becomes impossible, triggering distress sales, land loss, or exit from cultivation altogether. Climate change has turned this structural fragility into a systemic crisis. In 2025, India experienced extreme weather events on most days of the year. Heat waves arrived earlier and lasted longer; rainfall became intense yet erratic, and millions of hectares of cropland was damaged by floods, droughts, unseasonal rain and stress. These shocks now arrive repeatedly within a single agricultural cycle. In November 2025, this reporter travelled to a village called Kari in drought-prone Solapur, a relatively prosperous sugarcane-grape belt. Kari registered 30 farmer suicides in the 18 preceding months — most victims were in their 20s.
This raises an uncomfortable question: are small farmers meant to survive in India’s future food system? Policy insists they matter. Practice suggests otherwise. Yet, small farmers remain central to India’s food security since they produce a large share of cereals, pulses and vegetables. They sustain local economies and manage diverse agro-ecological landscapes. This column begins a year-long inquiry into those questions. The answers will not be found in slogans or schemes alone, but in whether India chooses to protect its most vulnerable producers in an era of unprecedented heat, volatility and inequality. The future of food depends on it.