Indian farms produced record harvests in 2017, and the government’s agricultural budget rose 111 percent over four years to 2017-18. Yet, prices crashed, 8,007 farmers committed suicide in 2015, unpaid agricultural loans rose 20 percent between 2016 and 2017, and 600 million Indians who depend on agriculture are struggling to get by.

This is the situation that faces the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government as it heads into its last full budget before general elections in 2019, at a time when Prime Minister Narendra Modi has promised a doubling of farm incomes by 2022.

The agriculture sector will not just watch how much money is set aside in the 2018-19 budget but also how it is used, as the National Democratic Alliance (NDA) also tries to woo disaffected farmers before upcoming assembly elections in eight states –Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Rajasthan and the northeastern states of Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, and Tripura.

Agriculture is the government’s “top priority”, Finance Minister Arun Jaitley said on 15 January 2018, admitting that “farmers were not getting the right price for their produce”. That is an acknowledgment that record harvests and government spending are not significantly improving India’s agricultural crisis.