At one time the common perception about India was that it was a poor country. V.K. Krishna Menon, a member of Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru’s cabinet, used to challenge this narrative. “No,” he would assert, “India is a rich country inhabited by poor people.”

Things have changed for the better, but one thing remains unchanged. The agricultural sector still accounts for the largest number of India’s poor. After all, roughly 60 percent of Indians depend on agriculture for their livelihood. They include farmers, including those without any land, and farm laborers, etc. Rains and drought can and do play havoc with their lives. Farming in India has also been blighted by small plot sizes, a depleting water table, declining productivity and lack of modernization.

To this should be added wrong government policies including last year’s demonetization. Now everybody admits that the withdrawal of high value banknotes has resulted in a price crash to the detriment of the rural economy.

It is against this background that we should view the farmers’ agitation now spreading rapidly in the country. From the southern state of Tamil Nadu where it started, the stir has spread to northern states like Madhya Pradesh, Haryana, Punjab, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and Maharashtra. With the exception of Tamil Nadu and Punjab, all of the states where farmers are on the boil are ruled by Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), although the previous Congress governments cannot escape blame for the growing discontent among farmers. Economic hardships drive them into the willing arms of banks or moneylenders until growing indebtedness forces them to take their own lives.

Since 1995, approximately 310,000 farmers have committed suicide. The number of farmer suicides went up by 42 percent between 2014 and 2015. Maharashtra has topped in farmer suicides in the last 12 years. On average, more than 10 farmers take their lives every day in that western state.

After two successive droughts, farmers expected their governments to take steps to ensure that they got remunerative returns for their produce. After all, the BJP’s election manifesto promised them a minimum support price (MSP) of cost plus 50 percent. But the Madhya Pradesh government told India’s apex court in February 2015 that it would not raise the MSP. While agricultural production in MP was growing around 20 percent, farmers were being compelled to dump their bumper crops of onions, tomatoes and potatoes. Other state administrations have also failed to make arrangements to procure crops and to do anything to ensure a reasonable price for farm products.

India has always found it difficult to cope with surplus harvests because of a lack of adequate food storage and processing capacity. For one thing, the country doesn’t have enough cold storages. In the absence of facilities to store food effectively, a bumper crop can easily spell doom for farmers.

Importing pulses from Myanmar, Tanzania, Mozambique and Malawi only makes matters worse.

Whatever the reasons, farmers’ agitation is the first major challenge the three-year-old Modi government is facing. It does not have the support of an organized opposition, as the opposition parties are too divided and weak. It has not affected ordinary people because last year’s food grains production (nearly 273 million tons) has left burgeoning surplus stocks.

However, this should not lull the government into a false sense of complacency. The way the farmers’ agitation has spread across the country points to a very serious crisis. Any long-term solution to this crisis or any overhaul of this vital sector of the Indian economy should take into consideration the fact that at current costs of cultivation and prices, agriculture has lost much of its attraction.