[Many have burned their fields in defiance of antipollution laws. Some say that has worsened New Delhi’s air as the capital deals with a third coronavirus wave.]
Mr.
Singh would have preferred to clear his rice field. A 41-year-old farmer in the
parched region of Punjab, he knew that setting piles of field waste on fire
after harvest contributes to the pollution that often chokes New Delhi and the
rest of northern India.
But
he is one of thousands of farmers in an increasingly nationwide pushback
against Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s proposal to overhaul the way many of the
country’s 146 million farms do business. Mr. Modi has said that his
market-oriented reform would free them from the constraints of a state-run
system.
Many
Indian farmers believe the overhaul will lead to lower prices and pave the way
for corporate takeovers of their small farms, which average less than three acres in size. Farmer protests that
began choking the roads to New Delhi last week have spread, intensifying
pressure on Mr. Modi’s government to strike a deal.
Their
defiance may be worsening problems in New Delhi. Deaths from the coronavirus
are rising as the Indian capital grapples with a third wave of infections,
exacerbated by worsening air pollution. Some experts say fires from angry
farmers are contributing to the pollution. The government disputes the theory.
The
two sides are set to resume talks on Saturday. While officials have said they
will not give in and repeal the laws, they could compromise on one of the
farmers’ demands: enshrining minimum prices for some crops into law.
In
the meantime, the protests have spread beyond New Delhi. Farmers marched and
waved banners in the southern states of Kerala and Karnataka and in the
northeastern state of Assam. Sugar cane farmers in Uttar Pradesh, who would be
less affected by the farm overhaul, set up a protest camp in solidarity,
clogging a central artery on the state’s border with Delhi.
India’s
foreign ministry summoned Canadian diplomats on Friday after Prime Minister
Justin Trudeau voiced concern for the farmers during a Facebook Live
session. The ministry said the comments constituted “unacceptable interference”
and risked damaging ties between the two nations.
Mr.
Modi’s government faced similarly widespread
protests late last year after it enacted an anti-Muslim naturalization
law. But these demonstrations present a trickier challenge.
Farmers
represent a powerful political constituency for Mr. Modi and his Bharatiya
Janata Party. Farmers could also be important for bringing India out of its
debilitating, coronavirus-driven recession. Agriculture has been a
rare bright spot, with farmers continuing to purchase consumer goods and
offering income for people who lost their jobs after Mr. Modi locked down the
country to stop the pandemic earlier this year.
Outside
New Delhi, protesters were settling in for a long wait.
At
the village of Singhu, on the border between the territory of Delhi and the
state of Haryana, protesters blocked several miles of highway. On a recent
visit, they were cooking and serving food on long mats, spread on the ground in
the style of Sikh temple kitchens, and sleeping on hay in tractor-trailers
covered with canvas tarps. An armed barricade blocked the road to New Delhi.
Harjinder
Singh, a wheat and cotton farmer in Gujarat, Mr. Modi’s home state, traveled
more than 600 miles to join the protest. He said that farming had become
untenable in Gujarat because farmers had no access to a state-run market that
subsidizes their crops.
“I’ve
got 100 acres there,” he said, “and now I’ve turned it into barren land because
of the government’s rude policies.”
Angry
farmers could make their worries felt beyond the protests.
After
enjoying some of its cleanest air in memory during the lockdown, New Delhi has
recorded day after day of catastrophically bad air. Pollution in the capital
surges near the end of every year, as cold winds sweep down from the Himalayas
and people try to keep warm, but the elevated levels amid the outbreak have
prompted questions.
Farmers
traditionally play a role in the annual pollution. Many set fire to large
swaths of land to clear fields ahead of the winter wheat sowing season, a
practice known as stubble burning. Farm fires have been estimated to contribute
between 2 and 40 percent of Delhi’s air pollution during the period.
Experts
say this year’s pollution levels could be blamed in part on displaced laborers
returning to farms, resulting in more cultivating. Satellite data has
registered the worst farm fires in four years. “Farm production is at a record
level,” said Panwar Sudhir, a life sciences professor of zoology at the
University of Lucknow who follows farming issues.
But
Mr. Sudhir and other experts said farmers may be ignoring
official threats and inducements to curb stubble burning as a way to protest.
State authorities have long worked to discourage the practice, including
offering the use of stubble-clearing tractors and paying farmers not to burn.
“What
farmers were saying was if we are protesting, and you don’t listen to us, then
we will burn the stubble,” said Ramandeep Singh Mann, an engineer turned
farmers’ activist in Punjab.
Government
officials dispute the idea of a direct connection.
“The
farming laws have nothing to do with this pollution impact,” said Prakash
Javadekar, India’s minister for the environment, adding that farmers will stop
burning when they have a less costly alternative — a goal that the government
wants to help them find.
“There
will be more solutions in the offing,” he said.
Whatever
the cause, the rise in pollution has been deadly as the coronavirus has made
its way through New Delhi. Delhi has witnessed record
daily infection numbers and its highest death toll since the pandemic
began, registering 2,612 deaths in November.
“Pollution
and cold waves worked like splashing petrol on the burning building,” said Dr.
Nikhil Modi, a pulmonologist at Apollo hospital in New Delhi.
The
pollution makes it harder for coronavirus victims, like Ritesh Agrawal’s
diabetic mother, to breathe. Last month, after she said she was struggling to
breathe, Mr. Agrawal immediately took her to be tested for Covid-19.
She
tested positive, and doctors advised home isolation. But within hours of
returning home, her oxygen levels plummeted.
Mr.
Agrawal, a 41-year-old businessman in Delhi, said his mother died after being
turned away from one hospital after another.
“I
have money and connections,” Mr. Agrawal said. “But even that did not help.”
The
Indian government has made fixing New Delhi’s pollution a priority. Mr.
Javadekar said that the government has purchased a fleet of electric buses,
expanded metro rail service and imposed steeper emission standards on personal
cars. It has also pushed sooty refinery work outside the city limits. It
monitors pollution levels from more than 3,000 industrial plants and notifies
plant managers by text message when emissions exceed federal limits.
At
the camp in Singhu, many of the farmers said they had no choice but to burn
their waste. Many of the farmers from Punjab are Sikhs. For hundreds of years,
males in that community have used the surname Singh to show their common bond.
That
community is under threat, said Navdeep Singh, 30, a seventh-generation farmer
from Amritsar in Punjab. Times are hard, he said, and government efforts like
making tractors available are ultimately still too expensive.
“We
are forced to burn,” Mr. Singh said, as he shelled peas for one of the
demonstration camp’s free kitchens. “The government hasn’t really helped us
with any other way to dispose of it.”
Karan
Deep Singh and Sameer Yasir contributed reporting.
