Preface The agitation by the farmers in the year 2020 against the three Agriculture Laws passed but repealed subsequently by the Central Government, has once again brought focus of the nation on issues faced by Indian farmers. While the Government had insisted that the proposed Bills were to enhance the freedom of the farmers, those agitating had felt otherwise. For anyone desirous of understanding the real issues of Indian agriculture, it is necessary to study the life and struggle of Sharad Joshi, who, in 1976, gave up his comfortable job in Switzerland, returned to Pune to do farming, studied the problems he faced and later organized farmers into a formidable force to fight for their economic wellbeing and freedom. Sharad Joshi and the farmers’ struggle he led was an unprecedented storm. During the sugarcane agitation he launched in 1980, thirty thousand farmers were arrested in Nashik district and during the cotton agitation of 1986, ninety thousand farmers courted arrest in Vidarbha and Marathwada. Same was true of other agitations of the farmers he led. No other movement in post-independence India had a larger active participation of the masses. And yet, academicians and intellectuals rarely took adequate cognizance of this phenomenon. Even the books written specifically about farmers and their problems did not say much about Joshi and the farmers’ movement he led. Around 2011, this writer realized that not a single book existed in English or Marathi or any other language which comprehensively recorded his life. It was a classic example of a typical Indian trait of not having a properly documented biography even of leaders from Sharad Joshi : Leading Farmers to the Centre Stage
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