India’s Farmer Protests: Why Are They So Angry?

Farmers, traders and customers weave through waist-high heaps of chili peppers, piles of ginger and mounds of carrots at a government-run wholesale market in western India.

Lauren Frayer/NPR

NASHIK, India – In a dusty lot outside a wholesale market in western India, farmer Ambadas Sanap leans on the lip of his flatbed truck, surrounded by crates of green peppers and tomatoes. If he could get away from all this for just one day, he says, he’d travel to the capital to protest.

He wants his voice to be heard.

But Sanap, 44, cannot afford to take time off from laboring in his fields or hawking his produce at this sprawling government-run wholesale yard. He’s got nine family members to feed.