Sustaining the City by Draining the Countryside

While critiques of Indian agriculture have long focused on the crisis of commercial cash crops and the corporatisation of wheat and paddy procurement, this focus creates a significant oversight. By treating the state-backed system as the universal standard, such analyses overlook the reality of the vast majority of smallholders—those growing pulses, millets and rain-fed crops who were never integrated into formal procurement to begin with.

Consider the micro-farm in the foothills of Uttarakhand. A family tends a modest plot: a dozen goats, backyard poultry supplying fresh eggs and a handful of citrus and mango trees—one lemon tree alone yielding…...

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https://off-guardian.org/2026/08/13/sustaining-the-city-by-draining-the-countryside/