Gurmeet Singh Sandhu, 58, has been at Shambhu border for 12 days. He owns 4.2 acres of irrigated land in Sangrur, Punjab โ a holding that puts him in the top 15% of Punjab farmers by acreage but the bottom 60% by net income after diesel, fertiliser and labour. He has left a young son to manage the standing wheat crop. The mandi rate for his Sharbati wheat is 2,275 per quintal against MSP of 2,425 โ a gap his family closes by harvesting late and selling in installments. Across the protest site there are tractors with mattresses for sleeping, communal langars run by Punjab gurdwaras, mobile clinics from Khalsa Aid, and small libraries set up by retired teachers. Two farmers have died โ Lakhwinder Singh of cardiac arrest at 5 AM on May 8, and a 22-year-old, Shubhkaran Singh, in a tractor-trailer accident on May 9 when a security barrier collapsed. The agitation is not glamorous. It is older men, sun-burned, sleeping on borrowed bedding, far from family, eating from common kitchens, surrounded by a Haryana police force their cousins might once have served in. The cost of being at Shambhu is income forgone, family stress, declining health, and physical risk. The fact that 50,000 are still here is its own indicator of how unsustainable the underlying farm economics has become.