This article situates Indian agriculture within the growing field of sustainability transitions, a literature that has largely neglected agriculture in the Global South. We argue that India’s Green Revolution model, characterised by high external inputs, water-intensive crops and technocratic extension, has reached ecological, economic and epistemic limits. Dominant policy responses organised around “productivity and populism” have prioritised short-term farm incomes but deepened long-term vulnerability through soil degradation, groundwater depletion and input dependency. Drawing on recent Indian scholarship and practitioner experience, we conceptualise agricultural transitions not as technological substitutions but as a socially negotiated processes shaped by power, knowledge and institutions. We argue for research that connects agroecology with sustainability-transitions thinking, highlighting the role of civil society, farmer organisations and public institutions in co-producing alternative pathways. We identify key challenges and opportunities for scaling agroecological transitions in India from the five papers in this special issue. We conclude by outlining a research agenda focused on landscape-level change, epistemic justice and metrics that move beyond productivity to include soil health, biodiversity, water and labour, thereby enabling more just and resilient smallholder food systems.
This chapter describes our journey as a group of activists, researcher-activists, and scholars, associated with a grassroots collective in western Avadh (North India) and an academic institution in Delhi, coming together to develop a collaborative research and action-oriented project, with the goal of strengthening efforts to build a just food future. The important ideas of challenging hegemonic structures, interrogating individual privileges, incorporating a diverse set of perspectives, and pluralizing pathways of knowledge creation, which then inform subsequent action, form an integral part of radical food geographies (RFG) praxis, and are reflected in our work. Our multiscalar analysis shows how a range of factors led to a heterogeneous transformation of agriculture in the region, and produced the dietary changes and poor health outcomes that are visible today. The recognition of deeply exploitative sociocultural hierarchies, exacerbated by the colonial encounter, have bolstered our efforts to develop a counter-hegemonic food system in western Avadh. By bringing in an important set of voices from the Global South, and by shining light on the intersectional experiences and specific inequities related to caste and food in the context of India, our work pushes the boundaries of RFG praxis.
This article argues that the repeal of the farm laws and even meeting the demand of the protestors to reduce corporatisation of agriculture and enhance the role of the state through expansion of guaranteed procurement is unlikely to bring significant positive transformation for farmers or consumers. Indian agriculture was remade through an industrial logic by harnessing science and technology, not by corporations but by the might of the state in the 1960s during the Green Revolution. Beyond its well-known negative environmental and livelihood impacts, I show how this logic also transformed diets and damaged the health of people. Challenging the tropes of food security, modernisation, efficiency and quality that have been used to justify the perpetuation of this logic, I argue that only by tracing the relationships that have led to the present, can we begin to unravel them and reimagine a healthier and more sustainable agrarian future.
By tracing specific moments in the history of the more-than-human landscape constituting the food geography of western Avadh, a long settled agricultural heartland in the Indo-Gangetic plains, this paper challenges the neat formulations of the Anthropocene laying out decisive global impacts of humans on the environment. Building upon the concept of the 'patchy Anthropocene', we show how outcomes are shaped by an imbrication of humans and non-humans-where powerful human actors seek to coerce people and corral the environment into their projects of remaking the landscape, but also where recalcitrant ecologies and resistant people thwart these intentions, especially during the colonial encounter. Contestations across power hierarchies and unintended outcomes litter the wake of the Anthropocene - as we show, efforts to save the non-human cow in the last decade have intensified processes associated with the Great Acceleration. Instead of treating the trajectory of food geographies like western Avadh as outliers and marginal to the normative process of defining change, we argue for treating it as constitutive of the norm. Only through such a process of decolonisation, by 'provincialising the Anthropocene', can we hope to push for epistemic justice, ecological sustainability and a more equitable world.
Debates on the origins of COVID-19 point towards two threads—one, that the virus jumped over from bats to humans through wild pangolins as the intermediate host, possibly at a seafood market in Wuhan, China and second, it came from factory-farmed domesticated pigs in Wuhan. In both cases, the source of the problem lies in our food production and consumption model that is destroying the diversity of nature, both species and their habitats, and creating conditions for repeated zoonosis. Over the last two decades, viruses have jumped the species barrier over to humans, leading to SARS (through civet cats in China), MERS (dromedary camels in the Middle East), Swine flu (pigs in North America), Nipah virus (pigs in Malaysia) and avian influenza (through infected birds; World Health Organisation, 2020). Moreover, the very same processes that have produced conditions for viruses to emerge and infect human beings are also compromising our immunity by converting us into standardised consumers eating standardised foods with low nutritional diversity, thus, hurting our health. In this essay, I argue that transforming our food systems to re-value the variability of nature and enhancing our ability to work with variability can provide a resilient response out of this crisis. Opinion
In this conversation, Bharat Bhushan Tyagiji, national award winning farmer from western Uttar Pradesh, and social anthropologist Richa Kumar, together attempt to analyse the alternative perspective of Tyagiji on the current crisis of farming in India, especially Punjab. Unlike typical alternative perspectives that uncritically glorify ‘tradition’, romanticise nature, and dismiss science and machines, Tyagiji’s views are refreshingly different. His focus is on the present; he is not enamoured by tradition or by so-called traditional knowledge. At the same time, he seeks to put science back in its place—within a larger discourse and appreciation of the knowledge of living in this world with meaning and purpose. He argues for working with scientific knowledge rather than dismissing it entirely, and he wants to use technology as part of a system that also centrally values human labour. But before we can change agriculture, he argues, we have to first contend with questions of how we want to live, and what we want to value. This conversation is a small contribution towards helping us think through some of these vexing questions in the context of the future of farming.
This book is an ethnographic study of the processes of agrarian change in the Malwa region of central India over the last forty years, beginning with the introduction of soyabean cultivation in the 1970s, known as the ‘yellow revolution’, and new information technology based markets in the 2000s, called the choupals. Examining the claims of prosperity and empowerment of farmers through the yellow revolution and the information revolution, this book challenges the notion that science and technology can bring unparalleled economic growth and prosperity to rural India. It argues that both techno-managerial ways of understanding and evaluating agriculture as well as those which emphasize the lenses of caste, class, and gender are inadequate in capturing the diverse processes at work in shaping the lives of rural people. Highlighting the role of the environment and technology, not in deterministic ways, but as non-human forces working upon and with human agents, it suggests that both the social and the technical must be considered together to understand the specific trajectories of agrarian change and the possibilities of rural transformation. Drawing upon science and technology studies (STS), together with critical scholarship on the political economy of development and agrarian change, this book shows how people and things have reconfigured each other in producing the world they live in, thus contributing towards new theoretical framings of agriculture and rural transformation.
The idea of a 'good farmer' who adheres to scientific methods of crop production and produces high yields was commonly articulated by scientists and some farmers in Malwa, central India, while evaluating soybean farming. However, through detailed ethnographic description of the everyday practices of soybean farmers in Malwa, this paper argues that there is no direct link between scientific methods and high productivity, defined as yield per unit of land, because the outcome is dependent on variables that cannot be controlled by farmers. Rather, the metaphor of a 'good farmer' was selectively used by upper-caste farmers to reinforce their power and authority in the face of declining state support to emphasize their continued importance to agriculture and the state. When upper-caste farmers were less productive, they placed the blame on the environment, but when lower-caste farmers produced less, the blame was placed on their (lack of) capability to understand scientific techniques that were expected to increase productivity. This paper suggests that instead of using the productivity discourse to evaluate farming, a different valuation reveals the positive contribution of soybean as a poor farmer's crop due to its agronomic characteristics and market environment.
ABSTRACTPrice information provision and disintermediation have often been considered means to empower farmers, since lack of information and multiple intermediaries are seen as major obstacles preventing farmers from obtaining a higher price for their produce. Using the example of soybean in Malwa, central India, which is a cash crop that links farmers to global consumers, this article argues that the very expectation of disintermediation in the soybean supply chain is misleading. India's position in these global networks puts farmers and intermediaries in Malwa in the position of price receivers: they are unable to influence the global price of soybean or manipulate its local price in any way. In this context, providing price information has negligible impact on the final price obtained by farmers. The potential for empowerment has to be understood more broadly, by mapping out the ways in which power is exercised by various actors in the marketplace — one of which is the determination of the quality of a farmer's crop. This article maps such possibilities by examining how norms regarding quality in soybean are created and enforced, and how they are influenced by broader logics that go beyond the soybean marketplace itself.
Over the past few years, the long-term sustainability of ICT initiatives has increasingly come under question. Despite persistent doubts, governments, international agencies, NGOs, and private companies are pressing ahead to set up more such projects. This paper studies the financial sustainability of India's largest rural ICT initiative known as eChoupal. The eChoupals are distinct from other telecenter projects in that the value added is not in providing ICT infrastructure alone, but rather, in enabling efficiencies in the agricultural sector through greater information exchange and creation of an alternative market structure. An analysis of available data indicates that this project has a potential payback period of 3.9 years. Although several assumptions have been used in these calculations, a sensitivity analysis has been performed to provide a range of possible scenarios that show the profitability of the project. Through this analysis it seems that ICT projects can be financially sustainable when they are viewed not as an end in themselves but as tools to facilitate information exchange whereby, use of the technology enables higher efficiencies in another existing or new business setting, which provides the source of revenue to recover the initial investment.
