Union Budget 2025: What do farmers want? Premium

The upcoming Union Budget 2025 under Modi regime will further harm farmers and agricultural workers in India.

Considering the ten earlier Budgets of the BJP-led government led by Prime Minister Narendra Modi, there is nothing much that the farmers and agricultural workers of India can expect from the coming Union Budget 2025 (eleventh) except more vicious attacks on their livelihood, made under the smokescreen of high-sounding phrases about their welfare.

To put it bluntly, it is now crystal clear that all the earlier Budgets of the Modi regime have fattened a handful of crony domestic corporates and international finance capital and have squeezed all sections of the working people, farmers and agricultural workers in particular.

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The ascension of the aggressive Donald Trump to the U.S. Presidency will further increase the imperialist pressures on all sectors of the Indian economy, including agriculture.

The last Union Budget of July 2024 had slashed food subsidy by ₹7,082 crore and fertilizer subsidy by a whopping ₹24,894 crore! The Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA) allotment of ₹86,000 crore was less than the amount actually spent the previous year. Overall allocations for agriculture and the allied sectors declined from 5.44% in 2019 to 3.15% in 2024.

All these disastrous steps are being taken despite the National Crime Records Bureau’s (NCRB) data, which tells us that 1,00,474 farmers and agricultural workers committed suicide in the eight years of the Modi regime, between 2015 and 2022. Similarly, the Global Hunger Index 2024 reveals that India ranks towards the bottom — 105th out of 127 countries. These figures are a stark and tragic indication of India’s agrarian crisis.

As an ominous curtain raiser to the 2025 Budget, the Modi regime on November 25, 2024 unveiled the Draft “National Policy Framework on Agricultural Marketing (NPFAM)”. The NPFAM aims to smuggle in through the back door some key pro-corporate provisions of the three controversial Farm Laws, which the Central Government was forced to repeal after the iconic year-long farmers’ struggle led by the Samyukta Kisan Morcha (SKM) in 2020-21. There have already been large countrywide farmers’ protests against the NPFAM in December and January. The primary demand of farmers is that the NPFAM must be withdrawn forthwith.