For years, I believed that the “cheapness” of food in India came from external forces — multinationals lowering prices, governments pouring subsidies, aggressive market capture strategies.

But that was an illusion.

After 7 years of farming and 4 years of running an organic shop, I’ve had to accept a harder truth:
Food in India is not cheap.

People are poor — and that poverty is engineered.

If food were truly cheap, Indians wouldn’t be spending close to 50% of their income on food. They wouldn’t be cutting nutrition to balance household budgets. They wouldn’t be skipping fruits and protein.

The price looks low only because the real costs have been dumped onto:

• the soil
• the water
• the air
• the climate
• and most of all, the people who grow the food

The Indian food system survives not on subsidies, not on efficiency — but on the suppression of labour and the protection of those who hold power.

We romanticise the Indian village. But beneath the nostalgia lies a brutal hierarchy shaped over centuries. The idyllic rural life exists only for a few. For the rest, it is a space where mobility is crushed long before ambition can form.

One of the oldest tools of oppression is usury — moneylending at crushing interest rates by historically dominant castes. Generations get trapped. Entire lives are spent repaying debts taken for basic survival.

And another force that has silently upheld these inequalities is the fear of the supernatural. Ideas of ritual impurity, divine punishment, curses, and “pollution” were weaponised to enforce caste boundaries. Even today, in many villages, people obey these invisible rules out of genuine fear that breaking them will bring misfortune. This is psychological bondage — control not over land, but over the mind.

The caste system prevents solidarity.
It prevents collective bargaining.
It ensures wages stay low.

A farm labourer earns ₹300 if she is a woman and ₹500 if he is a man — on days work even exists. Mechanisation has reduced available labour days. Modern India has not created enough alternative jobs to absorb displaced rural workers.

And when people migrate to cities, the same caste and class hierarchies quietly reproduce themselves.

Ambedkar saw this coming. He warned that economic justice cannot survive without social equality, yet India continues to pretend the two can be separated.

Now, I must speak about my own life.

I am able to farm organically only because of the caste and class cushion I inherited. My father could spend an absurd amount on my education. I could buy land. I could build a house. I could create a brand. These were not acts of extraordinary talent — they were acts of privilege. The people who work on my farm cannot even imagine these possibilities.

There is another painful contradiction: the people who grow food cannot afford to eat well themselves. Most do not have access to a diverse meal plate — not because they don’t care, but because they were never given education, exposure, or income to understand or afford nutrition.

Whatever “progressive” things we do — sharing produce, cooking lunch together — makes us feel good, but changes nothing structurally. Charity is not justice.

The Green Revolution increased yields, but it did not increase dignity.
It made India food-secure, but it did not make India egalitarian.
It improved production, but it did not improve conditions.

Despite decades of subsidies, MSP, PDS and institutional credit, food still occupies a massive share of household budgets — and that alone is proof that the system is broken.

Agricultural labourers remain precarious. Farmers remain indebted. Inequality remains untouched. If we want a better society for our children, we must stop pretending these issues are accidental or temporary.

They are not.
They are structural.
They are engineered.

And they will remain — unless we dismantle the hierarchies that hold them in place.
Egalitarianism is not an ideal. It is the only path to real progress.

Regards

Sudhakar