DREAD AND DEFIANCE

Punjab’s long history of resistance has been driving the agitation against the farm reforms. Whatever its outcome, it is likely to drastically change the state. An in-depth report from the furrows and granaries of the state

- PRATUL SHARMA

Bharpur Singh sits on sacks of paddy in a tin-roofed warehouse large enough to house several hundred cars. He is scrolling through his smartphone to kill time, and looks up occasionally to check whether anyone is calling him. He has come from Jatana Ucha village in Punjab’s Fatehgarh Sahib district to sell his basmati at the mandi in Khanna, a town on the Grand Trunk Road from Amritsar to Delhi.

It is a Friday evening, and Asia’s largest grain market is numbing cold. Sudden icy winds from the Shivalik mountains in the north have plunged the temperature to 7 degrees Celsius from 18 degrees a few hours ago. “I am planning to go to Delhi soon to join the morcha (farmer protests),” says Singh, who is in his mid-forties. “The government has done us injustice.”

His face lights up as someone calls his name. A man transformed, he rushes for a tractor trolley parked nearby and brings a winnowing machine to remove dirt and chaff from the basmati rice he had harvested two months ago. It is a high-yield variety of basmati, known as 1121, that he had grown in a portion of his 10-acre farm. After winnowing, it weighs 30 quintals. It would be auctioned the next morning. The buyers are usually rice brand owners.

Known for its fragrance and length, the 1121 basmati costs ₹3,000 a quintal. It was developed in 2003, and it soon became a leading choice of farmers in Punjab, Haryana, Himachal Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh. The 1121 basmati fetched more than ₹4,500 a quintal two years ago, before US sanctions hurt Iran—the biggest importer of Indian basmati.