A waiver of their bank debt was among the key demands of the marchers in Mumbai. It would cost the state $5.23 billion — about $758 each for 6.9 million farmers. Another key demand was from farmers from the indigenous tribal communities who have for generations cultivated forest lands that are not officially vested in their names. They seek the implementation of India’s Forest Rights Act of 2006, which could confer them title deeds to those lands.

And the marchers, like all farmers across India, demanded minimum support prices for their produce at levels that governments have long promised. Prices received by farmers have seen repeated collapses. Dependence on the monsoon has been joined by an even sharper vulnerability to a rigged market. A severe water crisis, often driven more by unequal access than by poor rainfall, has further damaged agriculture.

The census in 2011 showed that for the first time since Indian independence in 1947, urban India added more people to its population than rural India did. Millions have left their villages for other villages, small towns and cities in search of jobs that are not there. As many male farmers moved out of their villages, the burdens of female farmers rose in ways numbers cannot capture. Between 1995 and 2015, the National Crime Records Bureau logged over 300,000 farmer suicides.

Successive governments have connived at and hastened the corporate hijacking of Indian agriculture, privileging the profits of a few over countless livelihoods. Millions of poor rural Indians whose transactions are almost entirely in cash were badly hurt after Prime Minister Narendra Modi in November 2016 banned two bills that account for a vast majority of all currency in circulation and decided to introduce new bills. The expansion of existing bans on cow slaughter wrecked the livelihoods of millions of farmers who bought and sold cattle.

Rural India’s deepening distress unfolds against the canvas of policy-driven inequality over the past two decades. The roughly five-member Indian farm household, according to the National Sample Survey Organization, a federal data collection agency, had an average monthly income of $99 in 2013.

The number of Indian billionaires on the Forbes annual list rose from 55 in 2011 to 121 in 2018. The collective net worth of our 121 billionaires was estimated by the magazine to be $440.1 billion, equal to roughly 22 percent of India’s gross domestic product. We now rank fourth in the world on the Forbes billionaires list and 131st on the United Nations Human Development Index.

The net worth of India’s richest man, Mukesh Ambani, rose to $40.1 billion on the 2018 Forbes billionaires list from $23.2 billion in 2017. To cumulatively make the amount Mr. Ambani added to his income in a year, 18.7 million rural Indians working under the Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme, the country’s flagship employment program, would have to work for 12 months without a day off.