Hafta letters: Farmers and APMCs, alcohol bans, getting people to subscribe

Hi NL Team,

New subscriber here. Great work and great coverage on farmer protests.

Joined only because of NL Tippani. Please make it more frequent, especially the Dhitarashtra-Sanjay Samvad.

Only thing is, I am not sure if I missed it but you did not mention the changes due to code wage rules changes. So please provide the link.

Regards,

Shreenivas

PS: Let me know if my question get picked up so that I can watch that episode of NL Hafta or Charcha.

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Greetings to the panel.

I am writing this in response to last week's Hafta letter.

I have been a subscriber for the better part of 2020. I discovered Daily Dose first, then TB Newsance. I subscribed after discovering the infamous GD Bakshi interview and Hafta.

As much as I want my friends to subscribe to NL, I know most won't. It's because of the nature of the content. Most people still get their news from Google or social media. Most of them lack attention to spare on specialised ground reports and commentary on news media.

I believe the quality of the content and the cause will eventually attract many more patrons like me. And meanwhile, to make the content more visible and accessible, I suggest you, rather than investing too much in traditional marketing, invest in search engine optimisation to increase visibility on Google, and invest in serious meme-ers and social media experts to make content spread wider on social media.

I love this podcast, and it adds one more thing to look forward to on weekends.

Thanks.

Kunal Ghai

PS: If you can add a volume slider to the podcast player it would be nice.

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Greetings,

First of all, you guys do a brilliant job. Your ground reporting from the farmer protests was brilliant and all the explainers you have put are great and helpful to get knowledge about the topic.

I have a few things to say about the topic of alcohol consumption that you guys covered in the last NL Hafta, as I have constantly felt that if you may ban things that are completely unnecessary, it will just hurt the state in one way or another. For example, if we may take the example of the prohibition period in the US, it did not reduce alcohol consumption but it surely hurt the government of the tax money they would have gotten if it was legal (the same goes for marijuana as well).

Also, in the last episode of Newsance, the way you guys mocked the Times Group was brilliant and in many ways it reminded me of the way John Oliver mocked people (for example, this one where he mocked Bob Murray).

At last, keep up the good work and congratulations Manisha ma'am on your wedding.

Best,

Himanshu Sachdeva

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Dear Team NL Hafta,

I am a Frenchman of Indian origin studying agriculture in Paris. Thank you for your coverage on farmer protests! I would like to just counter Anand on the narrative. He made it sound like it is free market vs APMC. This is not true as, according to the Shantakumar Committee report 2015, only six percent of farmers get MSP, most of them from Punjab and Haryana due to the Green Revolution's public investment.

Therefore, 94 percent of farmers already sell to the private sector but they are regulated. As Balbir Singh mentioned, they can already sell anywhere in the country but a smallholder farmer in Gujarat will not go to West Bengal to sell because most of them can barely leave their villages; 86 percent farmers in India are small or marginal farmers. Bihar is a good example because most farmers already did not get MSP so how would they know the difference if you abolish APMC markets? The solution to this would be MSP, democratising and increasing the reach of APMC and regulation, or else you would have mega corporations as middlemen.

APMCs have issues yes, but as P Sainath says: will you privatise all government schools because they have issues? You want to improve them so farmers are demanding regulation and MSP. Devinder Sharma suggests increasing access of farmers to mandis and improvements in the system. The main issue here is that most farmers cannot access the markets, the markets come to them. Free markets are regulated to protect the weak against strong players. Farm laws seek to create totally unregulated markets outside APMCs and say it will benefit small farmers. For instance can a totally unregulated stock market benefit small investors? No brainer, right?

I hope you can interview P Sainath or Devinder Sharma on these issues. On that note, I would like to recommend Everybody loves a good drought by Sainath and Devinder Sharma's blog.

PS: I was delighted with your takedown of Shekhar Gupta and his obviously biased approach towards big corporations.

Thank you!

Hemal Thakker

Student of International Relations and Environmental Studies |

Paris School of International Affairs , Sciences Po|