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
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. 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.
Climate-Smart Agriculture
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 and why despite failures, they continue to persist.
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 contemporary agriculture.
Drawing from this project, an article on how “more-than-human infrapolitics” reinforced a tech-entrepreneurial sustainability program received the Eric R. Wolf Paper Prize from the Society for the Anthropology of Work and recently appeared in Critique of Anthropology.
A second article, published in Economic Anthropology, examines how rapidly scaled sustainability interventions, even when well-intentioned, can produce harm for marginalized communities. Developing the concept of “violent sustainability,” the article seeks an epistemological bridge with tech-entrepreneurs, arguing that critique should not lead to inaction but instead invite reflection on how particular programs are placed within the webs of relationships in which they are implemented. Wiley recently recognized the article as the journal’s most downloaded article of the past two years.
My latest article, published in the Journal of Agrarian Change, examines the Indian state’s decade-long effort to end rice stubble burning in Haryana and precent Delhi’s air pollution, and shows how technology-based interventions enable the state to signal action without unsettling existing arrangements. Following a scholarly agenda that bridges academic research and public engagement, I have co-authored a policy report, written several op-eds, and co-founded a nonprofit working with women agricultural laborers in rural India who are likely to be among those most affected by climate crises.
