Maharashtra: “We are not statistics. Listen to us!”

On 25 January 2026, National Highway 160 was a stream of red flags as thousands marched from Nashik towards Mumbai. Their mission? To knock on the doors of Mantralaya and remind the politicians and bureaucrats that a promise made seven years ago remained unfulfilled.

It brought back memories of the long march of 2018, when the poorest of Maharashtra’s marginalised farmers and farm labourers walked 180 km, singing protest songs, spending nights on the highway. On 12 March, they poured into Mumbai at dawn, careful not to disrupt the business of the big city or the SSC board exams. What that peaceful rally of nearly 70,000 protestors at Azad Maidan was saying was this: “We can’t be reduced to statistics. Hear us.”

This writer spent three days walking and talking with the padayatris that year. They had no option, they said, but to enter the heart of power to be heard, loud and clear. That year, Mumbai heard, and empathised. The state government too seemed to have heard: assuring them that their demands would be fulfilled in a time-bound manner.

But the ruling alliance led by Devendra Fadnavis — which found both the time and the resources to implement the Ladki Bahin Yojana before the 2024 elections — did not keep its word.

“We are back on the streets,” the protestors said, “because we have been betrayed.”

The long march of January 2026 was therefore unlike any other protest in its rekindling of a democratic assertion, the only weapon of the masses when the State reneges on its assurances time and again. Led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) and its peasant front, the All India Kisan Sabha (AIKS), the protestors in this year’s adivasi-mazdoor-kisan march came from across northern Maharashtra’s hamlets and villages.

It followed on the heels of a massive rally mobilised by the AIKS on 21 January. More than 50,000 tribal poor marched from the village of Charoti to the district collectorate’s office in Palghar. When the district collector assured them that all promises except those that needed ratification by the state government would be fulfilled, they resolved to march to Mumbai. Assembling in Nashik, they spent Republic Day on the national highway.

Their demands included the granting of community and individual forest rights, regularisation of their land pattas, supply of potable drinking water, uninterrupted electricity to their villages, access to quality education, the earnest implementation of existing laws and the reinstatement of the recently annulled Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Act (MGNREGA). As one protestor put it: “That guarantee is our lifeline.”

In the winter session of Parliament, the Central government made structural changes and renamed MGNREGA as the Viksit Bharat Guarantee for Rozgar and Ajeevika Mission Gramin (VB-GRAMG), reneging on a legal guarantee for work and placing the bulk of the burden of financing the scheme on the shoulders of state governments.

“Only changing the name is not enough,” Sakharam Kharpade (45) from Murbad village told the People’s Archive of Rural India (PARI). “There are more people in need of work and wages, but fewer villagers get work — maybe five or six at a time, out of hundreds.”

PARI reported one of the protestors on the Palghar march, Lakshmi Dattu Boba, as saying: “Forget the whole year, we don’t get work… for a day.” She, for one, would not shy away from taking to the streets again, if their demands remained unmet.

On 27 January, a delegation met chief minister Devendra Fadnavis in Mumbai. In a meeting that lasted over two hours, Fadnavis provided point-by-point assurances that every single demand would be fulfilled within a three-month timeframe.

Dr Ajit Nawale of the AIKS told protestors that the CM had promised “all forest rights claims will be re-examined” to correct past injustices arising from incorrect departmental reports. It is a fact borne out by data that barring Gadchiroli and some other regions of eastern Maharashtra, the implementation of the Forest Rights Act (FRA) in the state remains a non-starter, facing as it does stiff resistance from the department of forests.

The march was called off, but the accumulation of unaddressed grievances, the routine failure of governance and the insensitivity and inaccessibility of bureaucracy were repeatedly highlighted. The protestors affirmed their future course will depend on whether Fadnavis’ assurances translate into action. If not, they will march again.

The recent padayatra also served as a reminder that those who produce our food, steward our forests and sustain rural communities are not to be invisiblised — they are central actors in our economy. Even the route — the long stretch of highway connecting rural Nashik to metropolitan Mumbai — symbolised the socio-economic distance between policy pronouncements and their reality at the grassroot level.

Both the FRA and the Panchayat (Extension to Scheduled Areas) Act were designed to shift power back to tribal and traditional forest-dwelling communities and extend meaningful local governance, but their spirit has been annulled by the State’s refusal to loosen its control over these precious resources. As a result, decades after these laws were passed, implementation remains shoddy, contested and slow.

Former MLA and CPI(M) leader Jeeva Gavit reminded people that the 2026 march merely sought enforcement of rights already on statutes, and noted that earlier meetings with officials — in 2018, 2019 and even as recently as 2023 — did not yield tangible results. Can Fadnavis be trusted to deliver this time?

Jaideep Hardikar is a senior Nagpur-based journalist and author of Ramrao: The Story of India’s Farm Crisis. Read more by him here