Beyond the Farm Laws: Corporate Cloud Poised to Reign Over India’s Fields

Nearly four years after India’s historic year-long farmers’ protests forced the repeal of three pro-corporate farm laws, it is clear that the government’s underlying agenda remains intact. The repeal was little more than a tactical retreat.

Today, the same agenda of corporatisation (recolonisation) is being advanced through bureaucratic schemes, digital agriculture partnerships and policy frameworks that promote ‘efficiency’ and ‘modernisation’.

The book Food Dependency and Dispossession: Resisting the New World Order offers insights into India’s agrarian crisis, with multiple chapters and substantial sections analysing the impact of neoliberal policies, the Green Revolution and the farm laws. In that book, I warned that corporate power would reassert itself following the repeal of the three laws. The book explored the true beneficiaries of the legislation, the motives of the powerful interests that demanded it and its far-reaching consequences for national sovereignty, farmers and the public.

In February 2022, when that book was published, I stated that repealing the three laws was:

… little more than a tactical manoeuvre…  The powerful global interests behind these laws have not gone away…  These interests have been behind a decades-long agenda to displace the prevailing agri-food system in India… the goal and underlying framework to capture and radically restructure the sector remains. The farmers’ struggle in India is not over.”

The intention to impose neoliberal shock therapy on Indian agriculture has never waned and remains clear in central government schemes and public-private partnerships.

The Pradhan Mantri Dhan Dhaanya Krishi Yojana (PMDDKY) is now the government’s flagship ‘umbrella scheme’ for agriculture. According to reporting by The Wire, it merges 36 existing programmes across 11 ministries into a single centralised plan, ostensibly to promote convergence and coordination. But farmer unions and policy critics argue that it represents a massive centralisation of agricultural governance that moves power, funds and oversight away from state governments and into the hands of the Union Centre.

The scheme, they warn, could become a corporate Trojan horse, creating a framework through which public–private partnerships with firms such as ITC, Mahindra and Godrej can quietly take control of rural infrastructure and extension services. Under the guise of coordination, the state is vacating space for powerful corporations to occupy.

This creeping corporate control is being reinforced through the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR), the country’s premier agricultural body. Between 2023 and 2024, ICAR signed a series of partnerships with multinational agribusiness and technology corporations, including Bayer, Amazon and Syngenta. Officially, these memoranda of understanding are about promoting ‘climate-resilient’ and ‘digital’ agriculture.

In reality, however, they mark a decisive step in outsourcing research, technology and data management to corporations, many of which have a history of scientific deception, aggressive lobbying, subterfuge, vilifying critics and self-serving political manipulation.

Bayer, a company notorious for its history of toxic agrochemicals and monopolistic seed control, is now involved in designing carbon markets and crop-protection regimes. Amazon Kisan integrates India’s farm produce into its digital supply chains, effectively positioning the e-commerce giant as a gatekeeper between farmer and consumer. And Syngenta’s role in drone and AI-based ‘precision’ farming embeds expensive, proprietary technologies that make farmers dependent on corporate platforms.

Under the guise of ‘modernisation’, we are seeing the construction of a complex that binds farmers into new forms of digital corporate dependency. Knowledge, data and decision-making shifts from the field to the cloud.

Contrast this enthusiasm for state-corporate partnerships with the lack of progress on the promise of a legal guarantee for the minimum support price (MSP) (a floor price for various crops) made during the repeal of the farm laws in 2021. The committee on MSP formed that year has produced no tangible outcomes. Meanwhile, corporate collaborations move with lightning speed and with little to no democratic oversight or accountability.

There is also the draft National Policy Framework on Agricultural Marketing (NPFAM), which farmer organisations such as the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and All India Kisan Sabha describe as the “return of the farm laws by stealth.” The framework’s talk of “market integration” and “value-chain infrastructure” closely mirrors the deregulation proposed in the repealed laws. It encourages the creation of private wholesale markets and permits direct procurement by corporate agribusinesses such as Cargill, Walmart and Amazon, bypassing state-regulated wholesale markets or mandis. It also envisions the gradual transfer of storage and distribution infrastructure to private control.

Together, these measures threaten to dismantle the last remaining safety net for farmers during price volatility and market shocks.

The government claims that reforms will create a “unified national market.” In practice, they are intended to create a corporate-controlled market. Without a legally enforceable MSP, farmers are left to the mercy of fluctuating prices and corporate purchasing power. The result is a system designed for profit extraction rather than public welfare.

Mumbai-based Janata Weekly notes that expenditure on procurement and price support has been slashed or merged into vague umbrella schemes, diluting their effectiveness, while funds for digitalisation and private-sector “innovation missions” have grown. Janata Weekly states that the political economy is clear: the state’s role is being redefined from guarantor of livelihoods to broker for corporate investment.

If these plans succeed, it is likely that the end-result will be the weakening and eventual withdrawal of public institutions such as the Food Corporation of India and the Public Distribution System, thereby eroding one of the world’s largest food security networks (under the National Food Security Act, India’s food welfare programmes currently serve more than 800 million people, providing subsidised food to a significant portion of the population). The resulting vacuum would be filled by multinational supply chains. The likely outcome, as The Wire warns, is a future where India must rely on the same corporations that now dominate its agricultural policy to purchase its own staples.

In response, since early 2024, new waves of protests have erupted. The demands remain consistent: a legal guarantee for MSP, debt waivers and the repeal of corporate-friendly policies such as the NPFAM. The response has been familiar too in the form of detentions, tear gas, bulldozed encampments and internet shutdowns in protest zones. Social media accounts of union leaders and journalists have been taken down under official orders.

The ability to feed a population on its own terms is the foundation of national sovereignty. As the state retreats and global capital advances, India risks becoming dependent not only on imports but on the dictates of multinational supply chains that prioritise profit and control over nutrition and need.

The farmers protest 2020-2021 received massive global media coverage. The agitation led to the repeal of the farm laws, but it was a symbolic victory and did not change the underlying trajectory. Unless India ensures its food system serves the public good—grounded in food sovereignty and the protection of farmer rights—corporate capture will only deepen.

Colin Todhunter specialises in food, agriculture and development and is a research associate of the Centre for Research on Globalization in Montreal. His open access books on the global food system can be accessed via Figshare (no sign in or sign up required).

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