Withdrawal of farm laws is a missed chance for a progressive Indian society

India's farm economy sends desperate, landless poor to cities when it should be the bedrock of a more secure and permanent urban proletariat.

Now that Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sacrificed his poorly designed makeover of India’s farms at the altar of electoral math, there will perhaps be no fresh attempt at reform for a decade. That’s a shame for urbanization.

Agriculture in the second-most-populous nation suffers from many infirmities: Unlike the Japanese rulers of Taiwan in the first half of the 20th century, Britain’s colonial government in India didn’t give tenants secure rights, dooming post-independence land reforms. Holdings are fragmented and uneconomical; crop diversification beyond rice and wheat is poor; subsidies abound but public investment is paltry.

With the 1960s spurt from