  Despite agriculture being the primary source of livelihood for more than half
of India's population, several socio-economic policies are implemented in the
Indian agricultural sector without paying enough attention to the possible
outcomes of the policies. The negative impact of some policies can be seen in
the huge distress suffered by farmers as documented by several studies and
reported in the media on a regular basis. In this paper, we model a specific
troubled agricultural sub-system in India as a Multi-Agent System and use it to
analyse the impact of some policies. Ideally, we should be able to model the
entire system, including all the external dependencies from other systems - for
example availability of labour or water may depend on other sources of
employment, water rights and so on - but for our purpose, we start with a
fairly basic model not taking into account such external effects. As per our
knowledge there are no available models which considers factors like water
levels, availability of information and market simulation in the Indian
context. So, we plugged in various entities into the model to make it
sufficiently close to observed realities, at least in some selected regions of
India. We evaluate some policy options to get an understanding of changes that
may happen once such policies are implemented. Then we recommended some
policies based on the result of the simulation.

Computers and Society;Computer Science and Game Theory;Multiagent Systems