Far from the madding fields

In some ways, Jiyalal, once a farmer dependent on the vagaries of the monsoon, is a much-relieved man. Hailing from Mahua village in Uttar Pradesh, he has left his fields behind for the city. “A land that gives home but no food is worse than one that gives food but no home,” he says.After leaving home, Jiyalal migrated to the national capital with little in his pocket and the hope of finding work that could meet his family’s needs, something he could no longer manage through farming. After years of toiling in his fields, he now works as a daily-wage labourer at different construction sites, earning about Rs.800 a day. He makes around Rs.20,000 a month, considerably more than what he could earn from farming.Jiyalal’s case is not unique. Farmers across the country are increasingly leaving their farms as uncertainty, inadequate government support, and erratic weather conditions pull them away from their roots and push them towards other professions in bigger cities such as Delhi. It is not necessarily what they want to do, but it is what they are forced to do when everything else fails.For Jiyalal, the uncertainty of agriculture eventually outweighed the comfort of home. “Sometimes it rains, sometimes it doesn’t. There is no certainty. I left home so my family could eat,” he says.The trend is not new and has persisted for decades. A 2014 report of a survey conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), an autonomous research institute in Delhi for the social sciences and humanities, found that 76 per cent of farmers would prefer to take up non-farming work. Of these, 61 per cent said they would rather be employed in cities for better access to education, healthcare, and stable employment. Meanwhile, 70 per cent of respondents said their crops had been damaged by unseasonal rains, droughts, floods, or pest attacks, with such losses pushing many farmers off their land.Across India, thousands of farmers, like 56-year-old Mohammad Naushad, share Jiyalal’s plight, as they have been forced to leave their ancestral fields by erratic weather, inadequate state support, and stagnant prices.For such farmers, farming has become a trade of loss. Naushad, who left his family behind, once farmed in Bihar’s Katihar district until he could no longer sustain himself through farming. Now he works as a scrap dealer in Delhi. He recalls: “The seeds cost more than the money we made from selling our crops. The government never looked into the matter, and if there was any policy, it never reached us.”His experience comes against a larger economic imbalance in Indian agriculture. The Economic Survey 2025-26 says agriculture and allied activities account for 46.1 per cent of India’s workforce but contribute only about one-fifth of national income. It identifies fragmented landholdings, limited irrigation and access to quality inputs, low mechanisation, and stagnating yields in several crops and regions as continuing constraints on productivity and farmer incomes.Slow growthA PRS Legislative Research analysis of the 2026-27 Demand for Grants for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare similarly says agriculture and allied activities employ about 46 per cent of India’s workforce but account for 18 per cent of Gross Value Added. Between 2011-12 and 2024-25, the sector grew at an average annual rate of 4 per cent, compared with the 6 per cent overall GDP growth. Within agriculture, crop output grew at about 2 per cent annually between 2011-12 and 2023-24, compared with the 5 per cent growth in allied activities such as livestock, forestry, and fisheries.

In Markapuram district of Andhra Pradesh, crops dependent on borewell irrigation are drying up due to falling groundwater levels and a lack of rainfall caused by the El Niño phenomenon. | Photo Credit: KOMMURI SRINIVAS Sanjay Mehta, an expert on migrant issues and a migrant workers’ rights activist from Jharkhand, said: “Uncertainty is the main reason why farmers are migrating and abandoning farming. It has become insufficient to meet the needs of the people employed in the sector. The cash flow is hand to mouth, with nothing more to spend.” Mehta contested the 2024 Lok Sabha election but did not win.The crisis facing India’s farmlands is deepened by climate change, which has turned what were once predictable seasons into cycles of floods and droughts and worsened the conditions faced by farmers like Purab, a 26-year-old farmer from Katera town in Jhansi, Uttar Pradesh.He abandoned his 10-acre farm after unpredictable weather conditions repeatedly spoiled his crops, ultimately forcing him to give up his generational work on the farm and take up work at a construction site in Delhi’s Shaheen Bagh.“At times there would be too much rain, and at times not at all,” he says, describing how erratic weather has shattered his livelihood. “We never received any support from the government. Now there’s a whole group of us here, farmers-turned-construction workers.” Purab pointed to a large group of construction workers, all of whom had left their families and farms.He toiled on a 10-acre farm that sits right at the upper bound of the medium farmer category, just shy of official “large farmer” status, which requires 10 hectares (~24.7 acres), as classified by the structure defined by the Union Ministry of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. “Migration is not just restricted to small farmers, but it extends to farmers who hold bigger lands,” says Mehta.The experience is consistent with findings from the Development Intelligence Unit (DIU), a data-driven initiative focussed on providing analytics for development, and the Forum of Enterprises for Equitable Development. A survey of 6,615 marginal farmers across 21 States found that 83 per cent of marginal farmers in villages affected by severe weather conditions had changed their livelihood pattern, compared with 61 per cent in villages that had not experienced such conditions. The survey also found that 80 per cent of marginal farmers had suffered crop losses due to adverse climatic events over the previous five years.The Economic Survey 2025-26 also identifies climate variability, erratic rainfall, and extreme weather events as direct risks to crop yields and farm incomes. It notes that continued dependence on rainfall and inadequate irrigation leave farmers vulnerable to climate shocks.PRS identifies the same structural vulnerability, pointing to dependence on rain-fed agriculture and rising water stress as major challenges. It notes that irrigation remains uneven across crops and regions.The weather is not the only reason farmers want out. Another report titled State of Marginal Farmers of India, published by the DIU highlights the concern. It found that 83 per cent of farmers in villages affected by adverse climatic events were forced to change their livelihood, compared with 61 per cent in unaffected areas, a stark indication of how deeply the climate crisis is reshaping rural India.For Girija Shankar, a farmer-turned-fruit vendor from Bihar, migration is the only way to survive. “Farming couldn’t do enough to feed our family,” he says. “Here, at least I can earn and send money back home,” Shankar adds.His wife still cultivates their small field, but the household now depends heavily on his earnings in Delhi. Ironically, Shankar uses his city income to modernise his family’s farm. Yet when asked if he would ever return, he said he wouldn’t: “There are better earnings in the city.”Women’s unpaid workThe migration pattern in the stories of Shankar and Jiyalal brings out a bigger challenge that women farmers face. They work in fields, but their efforts are often not recognised or rewarded, and they receive no monetary value for their work. Jiyalal earns cash in Delhi while his wife continues working on the farm, with the produce helping sustain the household.

A woman working on a paddy field in Odisha, a file photograph. The labour invested in agricultural work by women often goes unrecognised and unrewarded monetarily. | Photo Credit: REUTERS “Back in Mahua, my wife still works as a farmer on a small patch of land to supplement the family’s food supply. The money I earn here now could be used for other things and to meet the food needs of the family. My wife works on our farm. It’s only enough to feed us food, but not enough to bring us any money,” Jiyalal said.The women’s work reflects a wider, often invisible, part of India’s agricultural economy. A 2026 report by grain commerce platform Arya.ag, “Her Harvest 2026: The Hidden Cost of Women’s Invisible Work in Indian Agriculture”, found that 50.5 per cent of women working in agriculture are recorded as unpaid helpers on family farms, compared with 21.7 per cent of men.Down To Earth, reporting on the study, said women make up about 48 per cent of India’s agricultural workforce but hold only 13.96 per cent of operational holdings.The report says women who are not formally recognised as cultivators can face restricted access to credit, agricultural inputs, procurement systems, and government schemes. It estimates that this gap between women’s agricultural labour and their formal recognition could be associated with annual agricultural output losses of Rs.1.2 lakh crore to Rs.2 lakh crore.“Women farmers don’t receive proper training to use the updated technology. They largely work as secondary workers who barely receive any monetary credit for it,” says Mehta. He adds: “In the last five years, the migration pattern has increased. There are more than an estimated 20,000 farmers who have migrated.”The cities where most of the farmers go are Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, and Hyderabad. The pattern is not just restricted to India but transcends borders, as countries like Saudi Arabia and other African countries also become a destination for these migrant farmers.But migration does not solve their problems. Last year, three farmers who had migrated to Niger were captured by a terrorist group. “They were later rescued by our team,” says Mehta.Nizam Alam is another farmer who left Kannauj in Uttar Pradesh and migrated to Delhi. From being a producer, he has become a seller of fruits in Old Delhi’s Jama Masjid.Sharing a cramped flat with other migrant workers for Rs.8,000 a month, he sends home whatever little remains. “My family still survives on farming, but it was never enough to meet our needs. Bigger cities provide better opportunities and wages,” he says.For men like Jiyalal, Purab, Girija, Naushad, Nizam, and many others, giving up farming is less a choice than a last resort, an act of survival. For the women who are left on farms, it is a struggle to move on without any monetary reward for their labour.Caught between two worldsThey are caught between two challenging worlds: one of villages that offer shelter but not sustenance, and another of cities that provide food but no home. This puts the policies being implemented into question. Mehta said: “Even if the government provides the latest technology at a subsidised rate, the lack of awareness and education becomes a hurdle, since the process involves a tedious application process. Many of the farmers can’t do it due to lack of education.“Hence, even if there are policies, the ones for whom they are made can’t be reached. Moreover, the government needs to bring uniformity in the pattern of the allocation of these resources to maximise the impact.”As the migration continues, the question of who will feed the country becomes more prominent. “I’ve given up farming, and now I have no plans of leaving [the city],” says Jiyalal.The stories of migrants like Jiyalal reflect a larger truth about the country: as the climate grows harsher and government policies fail to protect them, farmers are being uprooted not just from their lands, but from a way of life that once defined the nation.Abeer Athar is a Delhi-based author and freelance multimedia journalist. He has previously worked in radio broadcasting and editorial roles and has written on a range of social, cultural, and contemporary issues.Also Read | Repeal of farm laws did not resolve the agrarian crisis: Ashok DhawaleAlso Read | The carbon books are wrong, and Indian farmers are paying the price