Punjab Farmers Plan Five-Day Protest Over MSP, Power and Fertilizer
14 September 2026, Chandigarh: A Punjab farmers’ group announced on September 13 that it will launch five days of demonstrations starting September 16 outside the homes of the state’s Vidhan Sabha Speaker and seven cabinet ministers, reviving a familiar standoff between growers and the state government just as the paddy harvest approaches.
The Kisan Mazdoor Morcha (KMM), working alongside the BKU Ekta Ugrahan farmers’ union, said the protests will target the residences of Punjab Vidhan Sabha Speaker Kultar Singh Sandhwan in Faridkot and seven ministers from the ruling Aam Aadmi Party: Harbhajan Singh ETO in Jandiala, Aman Arora in Sunam, Lal Chand Kataruchak in Bhoa, Ravjot Singh in Hoshiarpur, Gurmeet Khuddian in Muktsar, Mohinder Bhagat in Jalandhar and Hardeep Mundian in Ludhiana. KMM convener Sarwan Pandher said an “intense phase of agitation” would be decided at a meeting on September 16 if the government does not respond to the union’s demands.
The immediate triggers are power supply and fertilizer availability during the paddy season, according to the union. Punjab’s agricultural power supply has been a recurring flashpoint through 2026, with farmers earlier in the year reporting shortages that cut agricultural electricity to as little as two and a half to four hours a day during peak planting, forcing many to fall back on costlier diesel-powered irrigation pumps. Fertilizer supply has been similarly contentious: the Union Ministry of Chemicals and Fertilizers stated in June that supplies to Punjab exceeded assessed requirements, citing figures of 11.45 lakh metric tonnes of urea delivered against a requirement of 9.87 lakh tonnes, and 1.80 lakh tonnes of DAP against a requirement of 1.11 lakh tonnes. Farmers and dealers on the ground have nonetheless reported periodic panic buying and localized shortfalls, which the state’s agriculture department has partly attributed to diversion of subsidized urea for industrial use.
A wider list of demands beyond this season’s inputs
Beyond power and fertilizer, the KMM’s list of demands is broader and longer-standing. It wants guaranteed government procurement at minimum support price for basmati, maize, moong, mustard and potatoes, crops that currently fall outside the main MSP-backed procurement system that covers wheat and paddy. It is also demanding a complete waiver of farmer and farm-labourer debt, compensation and government jobs for families of farmers and labourers who have died by suicide, withdrawal of the state’s Land Pooling Policy, reopening of the Wagah trade route with Pakistan, and an end to land acquisition for the Bharatmala highway project that the union says has taken farmland without adequate compensation.
The protest comes on top of a separate, longer-running agitation earlier this year, when farmer convoys under the Samyukta Kisan Morcha and other unions were repeatedly stopped at the Punjab-Haryana border while trying to march to Delhi to oppose provisions of a proposed India-US trade agreement, which they argued could open the door to cheaper imported dairy, edible oils and processed foods. The government has said dairy, rice, wheat and poultry remain excluded from that deal and that 90 to 95 percent of India’s agricultural tariff lines are protected, but farm unions have continued to press for a legal MSP guarantee modeled on the Swaminathan Commission’s cost-plus formula. Punjab’s government, an AAP administration, has so far offered talks at the chief minister’s level rather than direct engagement with the state’s power utility or the central agriculture ministry, which the KMM says is the level at which these issues need to be resolved.
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