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On November 29, the first day in Parliament, the Farm Laws Repeal Bill was passed in the Lok Sabha without discussion. Regardless of how this specific step is viewed and the motivations attributed to it, the prolonged protests by farmers and extended impasse offer a rare teachable moment for policy making for Indian agriculture.

Farm laws:

• Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce (Promotion and Facilitation) Act, 2020: To allow private sector participation in the trade and commerce of agriculture commodities. It meant bypassing the APMC mandis to conduct purchase of farm produce.
• Farmers (Empowerment and Protection) Agreement on Price Assurance and Farm Services Act, 2020: It aimed to regulate and govern the contract farming in India.
• Essential Commodities (Amendment) Act (ECA), 2020: to remove the limit of agri-stockholding, allowing private players to buy farm produce in large quantities. This was largely the prerogative of the Centre.

Problems with these laws:

• Centre-State agri-relations: These issues were under the State-level Agricultural Produce Marketing Committee (APMC) Acts, therefore under the purview of the States. In the 7th Schedule, the Entry 14 - Agriculture, Entry 26 - Trade and Commerce and entry 27 - Production supply and distribution goods and services, are part of the state list.
• Ordinance route: Little is known to the public even today on who authored these laws or who was consulted before their introduction as ordinances.
• These were passed in Parliament in haste by voice vote, in what is viewed by experts as a violation of established procedures. That Acts with serious ramifications for States should be passed without deeper discussions even within Parliament, let alone with specific inputs from stakeholders and experts, is bewildering.
• Farmers’ Produce Trade and Commerce Act particularly hurt States that had the most deregulated systems. A State that had no APMC Act, for example, suddenly found that all deregulated areas within the State would now come under the Centre’s regulatory ambit and control, subjecting private players hitherto operating freely in a deregulated environment to the regulations of a whimsical Centre.
• Further, by absolving private players from adhering to any State law in agricultural marketing, it effectively nullified the power of States to shape the nature and functioning of agricultural markets.
• States, regardless of the ruling parties, offered a more timely, relevant and nimble response to manage the fallout of the COVID-19 lockdown on agriculture than the centre. Beyond agricultural marketing, the central government’s efforts in the past such as One Million Ponds, 10,000 FPOs and One District One Product are often disconnected from local needs for robust and sustainable solutions for agriculture.

What needs to be done

• Bottom-up approach: While the Centre has the capacity to make landmark changes, true reform and action rests with local governments. States are better placed to assimilate and respond to the diversity of institutional and socio-economic contexts and agroclimatic regions. They are often better placed to incorporate local concerns for robust and sustainable solutions.
• However, this wouldn't create a unified agri-market: The central national challenge is that different States have different regulations and a different pace of reform in part due to the political stakes involved in tackling trader collusion in these markets.
• Delinking the regulatory and operational roles of the APMCs.