Vijay Koreti’s problem is not that he can’t sell his paddy for a bumper price. The one-acre farmer’s problem is he can’t make enough money round the year from his land to meet his needs. Because he can’t find work to sustain his needs in his village in Maharashtra’s Gondia district, he must migrate every six months. In 30 years, the 39-year-old witnessed marginal improvements in his village, but most things remain unchanged. His father migrated. He does that too. Single-crop isn’t enough.

How do the September “reforms” — the three acts that supposedly “liberate” a farmer — help the likes of Koreti? It is naïve to say the three acts would help small farmers. Anyone who has lived in a village for some time would get that. In the long run, they would replace one set of intermediaries with another, crush the age-old mandi and build food oligopolies. The three laws, passed without a debate, would alter the regulatory framework for farm trade and stocks; they won’t fix a gigantic small-farms issue.

The claims are as good as the Union finance minister’s summer stimulus package.

India’s poverty is deeply entrenched in rain-fed small farms. If you superimpose the map of rain-fed small and marginal farms on that of poverty, they’ll match.

The agricultural census of 2010-11 tells us that almost 50 per cent of India’s total population consists of small farmer households, and 85 per cent of all farms are less than two hectares. Their income levels are low, in both absolute and relative terms, matching minimum subsistence wages in agriculture, the reason why millions migrate to cities.

This farmer has been economically ravaged the most in the last 30 years. Markets, unfortunately, are not the solution. They could be a means of intervention. The Centre and state governments can’t wish away the problem or withdraw support from them, particularly when climatic aberrations are threatening to wreak havoc as they have across central India in the recent past. Millions of tonnes of standing grain crops, perishables, oilseed are gutted in the retreating monsoonal heavy rains. The three laws won’t be of any succour. Beleaguered farmers would now cry for a direct financial support.

India’s Green Revolution was fuelled by a simple formula: quality inputs, remunerative price and guaranteed timely procurement. It helped the agriculture sector for decades until we began dismantling those foundational pillars and an unprecedented agrarian distress enveloped our countryside.

A new deal has eluded the farm sector since then. For three decades, India has been clueless about what to do with farmers and farming — extend support or open it up completely for private players.

In his tenure, see how even Prime Minister Narendra Modi has shifted his goalposts. In April 2014, he promised a minimum support price recommended by the National Commission for Farmers popularly known as the Swaminathan commission — 50 per cent over production cost. He buried that promise. And now his government is threatening to end the support price regime itself.

Then, from the ramparts of the Red Fort, he spoke of doubling their income by 2022. With the second carrot, the peasantry forgot the first one. The prime minister moved on.

Post demonetization, he told farmers to bear with him for a few days and that he would set everything right. Farmers bore the losses for a decision he himself does not talk about now. Today, he’s telling them, reduce dependence on agricultural produce market committees — sell anywhere to anyone, as if a farmer was desperate for this miracle cure to begin selling his produce from tomorrow for hefty profits.

The market is one thing, remunerative price quite the other. The former is no guarantee for the latter.