View: Government and its representatives should directly engage the agitating farmers

Whenever an attempt has been made to reform the agricultural sector, the incumbent government has faced strong resistance. Manmohan Singh in 1991, Yashwant Sinha in 1999 and Jaswant Singh in 2003 attempted to reform fertiliser subsidies. But each time their efforts were resisted and scuttled. This political pushback was the primary reason why governments in the past avoided introducing farm reforms in the form of the three laws that were