Research
Farmers worldwide are facing economic and ecological crises that threaten their livelihoods and have expressed deep concerns about the corporate capture of agriculture. At the same time, nation-states are increasingly adopting Silicon Valley-style techno-financial solutions to address the climate crisis and reframe sustainability through market logic. India, with over 100 million farmers, has become a focal point for these developments in the Global South. Such efforts are not new: they stretch from agricultural industrialization in the Global North to the uneven rollout of the Green Revolution in the Global South. Yet since the mid-2010s, they have intensified, bringing digital technology hubs—often called Silicon Valleys—into unprecedented engagement with rural and agricultural issues. This expansion has proceeded with little attention to its social, economic, and ecological consequences, and carries potentially irreversible implications for climate futures. A combination of digital infrastructures, from cheap rural Internet access and low-cost sensors to cloud-based systems, has accelerated this transformation. A dense network of international actors is shaping this global narrative, including financial institutions like the World Bank, philanthropic foundations such as the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, research organizations including public universities, state development agencies like USAID, and, increasingly, corporations in Big Tech and agribusiness.
India’s Agrarian Crisis and the Agtech Response
This global turn toward techno-philanthropic solutions resonates with ongoing shifts in India. Indian farmers, particularly smallholders face deep crisis, marked by unremunerative farm prices and ecological degradation. Yet, in the past decade, India has also witnessed an unprecedented rise in agricultural technology start-ups (agtech). These ventures promise to transform farming by applying entrepreneurial models and digital technologies to agricultural problems. This surge has occurred even as farmers staged one of the world’s largest protests in 2020–21, opposing federal laws designed to deepen market-based reforms. “Innovation” and resistance thus unfold side by side, underscoring the stakes of agrarian futures.
Climate-Smart Agriculture: The Triple-Win Promise
A key framework shaping these interventions is climate-smart agriculture (CSA), which emphasizes a “triple win”: sustainable intensification, resilience building, and greenhouse gas mitigation. But the components of this framework remain vague, which allows radically different approaches—from biotechnology to organic farming—to be grouped under its banner. Critics argue that CSA often functions as a technical fix, sidestepping deeper social and political problems of the global food system. Yet, we know relatively little about how these solutions intervene in the everyday lives of farmers themselves.
Obsession with Scalability
Underlying these initiatives is an obsession with scalability: the capacity to expand projects across new consumers and geographies without altering their fundamental design. Agtech entrepreneurs frame scaling as essential to achieving climate-smart transitions. But prioritization of scaling shapes lived experiences for farmers, bureaucrats, and scientists alike. While anthropology has often treated scale as contradictory to meaningful ecological diversity, my research shows how scalability brings diverse actors and relationships into play. Despite repeated failures to achieve their stated goals, techno-utopian projects in agriculture continue to resurface: projects stumble, stall, or collapse, but similar initiatives are re-launched with remarkable continuity. Why do such projects persist, even when failure on the ground is overwhelming? These questions drive my inquiry into the politics of techno-utopianism in Indian agriculture.
By examining the intersections of scalability and sustainability in Indian agtech projects, my research complicates the assumption that scaling necessarily homogenizes or erases diversity. I show instead how scalability can at times even depend upon diverse actors and intricate relationships. In doing so, my work highlights not only the failures of these projects but also the social, political, and economic commitments that allow them to persist. In my Economic Anthropology paper, for instance, I demonstrate how rapidly scaled sustainability initiatives ultimately fail on their own terms, harming farmers and rural fieldworkers in the process.
