Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India

Karamchedu, Ambarish

doi:10.1080/17565529.2023.2211037

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 49 publications

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“…Jakimow (2014) uses the allegory of a casino for describing subsistence farmers' tryst with commercial agriculturewhen the conditions are right, farmer's aspirational and economic risks pay off. Yet when it goes wrong due to market price fluctuations or the vagaries of pests or climate (Karamchedu, 2023), aspirational possibilities remain out of their reach, and the opportunity for wealth, status and disassociation from the grounded experience of poverty is ripped away again.…”

Section: Water Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…On January 1, 2018, the new ruling Telangana Rashtra Samiti party announced its flagship free 24 × 7 power policy for groundwater, expanding electricity subsidies at an unprecedented scale at a state level in India (Fosli et al, 2021). Total subsidies and costs to upgrade its electricity capacity to supply the 2.7 million groundwater pumps in the state amounted to approximately $6 billion since 2014 and $1bn just in servicing electricity subsidy costs each year (Government of Telangana, 2022, 2023. In just under a decade since its formation, Telangana uses the highest proportion of its electricity for groundwater irrigation in India at 41% per year of total annual electricity consumption (ibid).…”

Section: The Political Economy Of Groundwater-led Agrarian Transforma...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Creating the ‘Rice Bowl of India’: Examining the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India

Karamchedu

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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This article explores the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India through the expansion of groundwater irrigation and rice production since the 1990s. Within this process, I speak to aspirations by subsistence farmers and imaginaries by state governments for agricultural commercialisation via expanding and investing in irrigation infrastructures. In India, this has largely been driven by private and decentralised investments by smallholder farmers. Theoretically adding to the literature on water infrastructures, development aspirations and groundwater governance, I find how farmer aspirations of rice cultivation and associations of the crop with food security and status drove the debt-laden and capital-intensive rapid adoption of groundwater irrigation in dryland Telangana, aided by specific discourses and electricity subsidies policies post the formation of the newest state in India in 2014. I find that political discourses of historical inequalities over water in the struggle for state formation of Telangana in 2014 mobilised electricity subsidies as a key lever to re-imagine the state as a rice bowl of India through groundwater expansion, producing uneven political economy and ecological repercussions for farmers. This article finds that while rice production increased in a short period in Telangana, it came at the expense of widespread well failures and indebtedness at the farmer and village level colliding with the fragile semi-arid climate and hard rock aquifer setting in the state, deepening distress and decay from depleted water infrastructures and failed aspirations.

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Section: Water Infrastructuresmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Political Economy Of Groundwater-led Agrarian Transforma...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Creating the ‘Rice Bowl of India’: Examining the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India

Karamchedu

2023

Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space

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Responses to Livelihood Precarity in Dryland India: Diversifying Out of Agrarian Distress

Karamchedu

2024

Development and Change

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Scholars of critical agrarian political economy see agriculture in liberalization‐era India as a form of disguised unemployment, part of wider agrarian distress. This article engages with literature differentiating the class/caste responses to agrarian and non‐farm livelihood distress in India to understand the different diversification options that households have available. The article draws on research carried out in a village in dryland, Bt cotton‐dependent Telangana in south India to show these variegated practices. While Other Backward Caste households invested in livestock to cope with heavy Bt cotton investments and losses, Scheduled Caste households focused on the educated rural youth, relying on their non‐farm wage labour in jobs such as taxi driving. Despite rural–urban migration and higher levels of education, under/unemployment remains persistent for rural youth. In this context, Ryuthu Bandhu, a cash transfer programme pioneered in Telangana in 2018, proved crucial for rural livelihood survival in the study village, contributing up to 22 per cent of annual household incomes. However, negative average net incomes across all households show that attempts to diversify out of distress have been largely unsuccessful.

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Dismantling agroecology: The coming of the genetically modified cotton-agrochemical complex in an Indian highland frontier

Choudhury

2024

Elem Sci Anth

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This article traces the coming of a genetically modified (GM) cotton-agrochemical complex to highland eastern India. In this region of rich biodiversity and Indigenous systems of food and agroecology, GM cotton cultivation has seen a meteoric rise over the past decade. I explore how this shift from a no-input polyculture cultivation of community-held heirloom varieties to market-provisioned cotton seeds and agrochemicals marks a rupture that is fundamentally transforming the relationship of cultivators to land, seeds, and knowledge systems around agroecological practices. I contextualize this ongoing material and knowledge rupture in the specificities of location—both in an agroecological space and in a sociohistorical matrix of caste and region. Thus, what enables or erodes agroecological practices and ways of knowing is not simply the socioeconomic marginalization of smallholder cultivation, but more fundamentally a caste-prejudiced logic in India that, on the one hand, disrupts ecological ties of Indigenous communities to seeds, biodiversity, and land, and on the other denies the contributions of Indigenous knowledge, agriculture, and food cultures toward sustainability and biodiversity. This coming together of an industrial productivist logic with casteist prejudice is what I call casteist capitalism. Casteist capitalism structures both state programs of “tribal development” and agribusiness strategies in the region. Together they work to deride long-standing agroecological practices, and the Indigenous communities which practice them as “backward” and in need of reform toward a modern, commercial agriculture, as represented by chemical-intensive cotton monocropping.

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Dried up Bt cotton narratives: climate, debt and distressed livelihoods in semi-arid smallholder India

Cited by 4 publications

References 49 publications

Creating the ‘Rice Bowl of India’: Examining the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India

Creating the ‘Rice Bowl of India’: Examining the political economy of groundwater-led agrarian transformation in dryland India

Responses to Livelihood Precarity in Dryland India: Diversifying Out of Agrarian Distress

Dismantling agroecology: The coming of the genetically modified cotton-agrochemical complex in an Indian highland frontier

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