COVID-19 Lockdown: Impact on agriculture and rural economy Vikas Rawal, Manish Kumar, Ankur Verma and Jesim Pais

Lack of planning and preparation by the Central government for tackling the COVID-19 pandemic has dealt a massive blow to India’s economy and has caused enormous hardships to working people of the country. The informal rural economy has been hit the hardest by this. Central government’s refusal to acknowledge the crisis and their mis-management in handling it has aggravated the suffering of people and has deepened the crisis further.

Instead of providing relief to farmers and rural workers, the government is using this crisis as an opportunity to further dispossess the working people of their rights and resources. Liberalising land laws to make corporate land grab easier, handing over national assets and resources to big corporations, facilitating predatory capture of markets by big business while small enterprises are struggling in the crisis, and relaxations in laws that protect rights of workers are on top of the agenda of the state. As Amitabh Kant, CEO of Niti Aayog, recently expressed in an article, the government is seeing this as a “now or never” moment to introduce “bold” reforms in “key areas” such as agriculture (Kant, 2020).

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