- [Anchorman] Thousands of farmers in India

are blocking highways and holding massive protests.

(farmers chanting in foreign language)

Demonstrators clashed with police

as they try to reach the capitol of new Delhi.

This is the second major tussle between farmers

and Prime Minister Narendra Modi's government

just months before national elections.

So here's what's behind the protests,

and what they reveal about the challenges

India faces to transform its economy.

- Farmers in Northern India began marching towards Delhi

on February 13th,

and they have a couple of different demands.

The biggest one, the most important one,

is that they want the government

to act as kind of a guarantee for more crops that they grow.

Right now in India, there is something called

a minimum support price.

That really helps farmers when prices crash,

and they know that the government will step in to buy,

at least for rice and wheat, some of their crop,

and that can help them cover their costs,

and is a protection for a lot of farmers.

But the problem is that other kinds of crops

don't get that same benefit.

So the farmers and the government

have been meeting several times

in attempt to get the farmers to go back home,

and right now they're camped out

around the borders of different states.

The government doesn't really want to extend

this legal guarantee to other kinds of crops,

and the reason being that it does actually

cost quite a bit of money to do that.

So they had come up with an offer to guarantee buying

for a few crops that the farmers were talking about,

and only to do it for maybe five years.

So basically they're offering more of a short term proposal,

and the farmers were not really happy with that.

They felt like it really wouldn't give them

the kind of security that they're looking for.

This is actually the second confrontation

between the government of Prime Minister Narendra Modi

and the farmers.

In late 2020, farmers protests

ended up lasting more than a year.

There is some interconnections between these farm protests

and the overall plans for the economy.

Some people say that there are unusually large number

of people in India still today very dependent on farming.

And usually when countries grow and develop,

many people come out of farming

and then they go into other kinds of jobs in cities.

And this happened in China, this happened in the US,

so we've seen that happen all over the world.

This is something that's really

important for the government.

They talk about it a lot.

They talk about jobs, and they talk about the challenge

of making India into a different kind of economy,

just a much bigger economy.

They want other kinds of jobs to take the place

so that people are not so dependent

on the vagaries of farming.

What some economists say

is that that is not happening fast enough.

We are seeing investments, and we are seeing factories,

but India would need to create millions and millions of jobs

'cause it has so many young people.

India is expected to go to the polls in April and May,

and farmers probably felt that this would be a good time

to put some pressure on the government.

(farmers chanting in foreign language)

Farmers are possibly one of the most important

political forces in India.

There are some 260 million people

working as farm workers in India.

That's a very big number of people that depend on this.

I think that the government would be worried

from that perspective.

They wouldn't want it to become snowballed into something.

And I think from what we saw from the last time,

nobody expected those protests to go on for a year.

So I'm sure that the government is very keen

to try to find a compromise

and work their way out of this with the farmers.

They would be really keen to show

that they indeed are trying to work with them.

(tranquil music)