Vol. 16, Issue 1, Jul-Dec 2023

Page: 79-93

FARMER'S RIGHTS IN INDIA

Rajshree Chandra

Received Date: 2016-09-06

Accepted Date: 2016-10-10

Published Date: 2016-10-18

Development and law have an intimate connection. Fuelled by ideas about innovation, progress in science and technology, and economic growth, particular development strategies are stabilised and institutionalised in the law. In a sense law becomes an exercise in line drawing, creating domains of legality, propriety, lawful relations, subject positions, delineating realms and people that are inside them as well as those that are outside. Farmers who commit suicide would seem to be, prima facie, “outside” of law, excluded from the protections granted to lawful relations. Ironically, this is not so. The farmers who are ending their lives (even as we speak today) are, paradoxically, those that fall within the protective purview of law – The Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers Rights Act (PPVFRA), 2001. It is the perverse disjuncture of the two theatres – of legal entitlement and of extreme existential marginality – that drives this study of rights and that also forms the raison d’ etre for the title “the curious case of farmers’ rights in India”.

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