Dried up livelihoods: The political economy of the “Liberalised Green Revolution” in India A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of Development Policy and Management in the Faculty of Humanities 2021 Ambarish Karamchedu Global Development Institute, School of Environment, Education and Development
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Dried up livelihoods: The political economy of the
“Liberalised Green Revolution” in India
A thesis submitted to the University of Manchester for the degree of Doctor of
Development Policy and Management in the Faculty of Humanities
2021
Ambarish Karamchedu
Global Development Institute, School of Environment, Education and
Development
2
Table of Contents
List of figures ......................................................................................................................................... 5
List of tables........................................................................................................................................... 6
Abstract .................................................................................................................................................. 7
Declaration............................................................................................................................................. 8
Copyright statement ............................................................................................................................. 8
List of acronyms .................................................................................................................................... 9
Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................................. 11
Chapter 1 – Introduction .................................................................................................................... 13
1.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 13
1.2 Theorising the Liberalised Green Revolution ............................................................................. 17
1.3 Bt cotton ...................................................................................................................................... 20
1.4 Tubewell irrigation ...................................................................................................................... 22
1.5 Non-farm livelihoods .................................................................................................................. 25
1.6 Telangana case study .................................................................................................................. 26
1.7 Thesis structure ........................................................................................................................... 27
Chapter 2 - Theoretical Framework and Literature Review .......................................................... 30
2.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 30
2.2 Theorising the Liberalised Green Revolution ............................................................................. 31
2.2.1 Environmental setting .......................................................................................................... 39
2.2.2 Credit/debt relations in the Liberalised Green Revolution .................................................. 41
2.2.3 Market intermediaries and governments under agricultural liberalisation ........................... 45
2.3 The Liberalised Green Revolution in India ................................................................................. 51
2.3.1 Cotton in the Liberalised Green Revolution ........................................................................ 58
2.3.2 Bt cotton in India ................................................................................................................. 59
2.3.3 Pro-Bt cotton groups and their detractors ............................................................................ 61
2.3.4 Transitions in groundwater irrigation in India ..................................................................... 66
2.3.5 Tubewells and the Liberalised Green Revolution ................................................................ 69
2.3.6 Individual incentives and institutional failures .................................................................... 71
2.3.7 The Liberalised Green Revolution and the consequences for future agrarian livelihoods .. 74
2.3.8 Non-farm diversification ...................................................................................................... 75
2.3.9 The political economy of the “lost decade” in India and its consequences for rural
livelihoods ..................................................................................................................................... 77
2.4 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 79
Chapter 3 – Methodology ................................................................................................................... 81
3.1 Introduction ................................................................................................................................. 81
3
3.2 Fieldwork preparation and site selection..................................................................................... 82
3.3 Scoping study .............................................................................................................................. 84
3.4 Main fieldwork phase ................................................................................................................. 84
3.4.1 Village profile ...................................................................................................................... 85
3.5 Using ethnography in a mixed method frame to investigate agrarian change ............................ 98
3.6 Positionality ................................................................................................................................ 99
3.7 Methods and techniques used in data collection ....................................................................... 100
3.7.1 Data collection summary ................................................................................................... 101
3.7.2 Fieldwork data collection process ...................................................................................... 102
3.7.3 Fieldwork data summary .................................................................................................... 102
3.7.4 Household surveys ............................................................................................................. 103
3.7.5 Interview household selection criteria ............................................................................... 104
3.7.6 Interviews ........................................................................................................................... 105
3.8 Data analysis ............................................................................................................................. 106
3.9 Ethics......................................................................................................................................... 107
3.10 Limitations of the fieldwork ................................................................................................... 108
Chapter 4 - What are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in the Liberalised Green
Revolution in Telangana? ................................................................................................................. 109
4.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 109
4.2 Economic motivations, ecology, and the switch to Bt cotton ................................................... 112
4.3 The rise of Bt cotton in Telangana ............................................................................................ 117
4.3.1 Cotton outcomes in Kacharam and Telangana ................................................................... 120
4.3.2 The consequences of Bt cotton failure in Kacharam and Telangana ................................. 131
4.3.3 Debt, risk and loss of economic control of rural livelihoods from Bt cotton ..................... 132
4.3.4 Input dealer, moneylender, and extension advisor ............................................................. 136
4.4 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 139
Chapter 5 – How has tubewell irrigation changed the political economy of agriculture in
Telangana? ........................................................................................................................................ 140
5.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 140
5.2 Tubewell adoption in the Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana .................................... 144
5.2.1 The entry of tubewell irrigation in Kacharam .................................................................... 150
5.2.2 The political economy of tubewell failure in Kacharam and Telangana ........................... 154
5.2.3 Intermediaries and governments as key drivers of tubewell failure ................................... 159
5.2.4 The role of private firms and governments in tubewell failure in Kacharam .................... 160
5.3 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 175
4
Chapter 6 – What are the implications of the Liberalised Green Revolution for future
agricultural livelihoods in Telangana? ............................................................................................ 176
6.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 176
6.2 Distress driven farm to non-farm transitions in Telangana and Kacharam ............................... 179
6.2.1 Rural youth and farming in Telangana and Kacharam ...................................................... 181
6.2.2 Contending with precarious non-farm employment in Kacharam and Telangana ............. 185
6.2.3 Risk indebtedness treadmills .............................................................................................. 193
6.3 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 196
Chapter 7 - Discussion ...................................................................................................................... 197
7.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 197
7.2 Revisiting and justifying the Liberalised Green Revolution ..................................................... 198
7.3 Technology adoption, agricultural commercialisation, and long-term farming outcomes ....... 202
7.3.1 Explaining agrarian change in the Liberalised Green Revolution in India ........................ 205
7.4 Limitations ................................................................................................................................ 215
7.5 Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 216
Chapter 8 – Conclusion .................................................................................................................... 217
8.1 Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 217
8.2 Thesis summary ........................................................................................................................ 217
8.3 Comparing and contrasting the thesis findings within India and beyond ................................. 219
8.4 Policy implications for Telangana and India ............................................................................ 222
8.5 Political economy implications for Telangana and India .......................................................... 224
8.6 Policy recommendations ........................................................................................................... 227
8.7 Areas for future research ........................................................................................................... 233
References .......................................................................................................................................... 234
Appendix ............................................................................................................................................ 269
Appendix 1 – List of interviewees .................................................................................................. 269
Appendix 2 – Interview coding example ........................................................................................ 273
Appendix 3 – Interview questions .................................................................................................. 274
Appendix 4 – Household survey questions ..................................................................................... 298
Appendix 5 – Consent form English ............................................................................................... 321
Appendix 6 – Consent form Telugu ................................................................................................ 323
Word count: 77,486
5
List of figures
Figure 1 - Liberalised Green Revolution Framework ........................................................................... 18
Figure 2 - Private Agricultural Modernisation Framework .................................................................. 33
Figure 3 - Liberalised Green Revolution Framework ........................................................................... 38
Figure 4 - Cotton Yields in India 1950-2019 ........................................................................................ 63
Figure 5 - Cotton Area in India 1950-2019 ........................................................................................... 64
Figure 6 - Irrigation Area by Source in India 1950-2014 ..................................................................... 69
Figure 7 - Map of Telangana................................................................................................................. 86
Figure 8 - Nalgonda District ................................................................................................................. 87
Figure 9 - Kacharam ............................................................................................................................. 88
Figure 10 - Kacharam Village Map - New OBC Colony ...................................................................... 88
Figure 11 - Kacharam Village Map - Main OBC and SC colony ......................................................... 89
Figure 12 - Kacharam Village Map - ST colony .................................................................................. 89
Figure 13 - Caste Diagram of Telangana .............................................................................................. 90
Figure 14 - OBC Colony ....................................................................................................................... 91
Figure 15 - SC Colony .......................................................................................................................... 91
Figure 16 - ST Colony .......................................................................................................................... 92
Figure 17 - Dried Up Bt Cotton Under Red Laterite Soils in Kacharam .............................................. 93
Figure 18 - Tubewell Irrigation in Kacharam ....................................................................................... 94
Figure 19 - Decadal Groundwater Levels in Telangana, 2006-2015 .................................................... 95
Figure 20 - Climate Vulnerability Index Telangana ............................................................................ 96
Figure 21 - Telangana Sorghum and Pearl Millet Net Area 1955-2018 ............................................. 116
Figure 22 - Nalgonda Sorghum and Pearl Millet Net Area 1955-2018 .............................................. 116
Figure 23 - Telangana Cotton Area 1955-2018 .................................................................................. 118
Figure 24 - Nalgonda Cotton Area 1955-2018 ................................................................................... 119
Figure 25 - Celebrity Bt Cotton TV Advert 1 ..................................................................................... 121
Figure 26 - Celebrity Bt Cotton TV Advert 2 ..................................................................................... 121
Figure 27 - Dried-up Bt Cotton Field in Mid Monsoon in June 2019 ................................................ 125
Figure 28 - Telangana Monsoon Rainfall 1951-2016 ......................................................................... 127
Figure 29 - Nalgonda Monsoon Rainfall 1951-2016 .......................................................................... 128
Figure 30 - Telangana Cotton Yields 1970-2018 ................................................................................ 129
Figure 31 - Nalgonda Cotton Yields 1970-2018 ................................................................................. 130
Figure 32 - Local Input Shop in Nalgonda District............................................................................. 138
Figure 33- Dried Up Dug Well in Kacharam ...................................................................................... 145
Figure 34 - Tubewell Irrigation System in Kacharam ........................................................................ 146
Figure 35 - Submersible Pump for a Tubewell ................................................................................... 147
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Figure 36 - Telangana Irrigation Area by Source 1955-2018 ............................................................. 149
Figure 37 - Nalgonda Irrigation Area by Source 1955-2018 .............................................................. 149
Figure 38 - Telangana Dry Season Rice Area 1998-2019 .................................................................. 152
Figure 39 - Nalgonda Dry Season Rice Area 1998-2019 ................................................................... 153
Figure 40 - Main Debt Sources in Kacharam ..................................................................................... 161
Figure 41 - A Tubewell Drilling Rig in Mallepally, a Nearby Town to Kacharam ............................ 163
Figure 42 - Tubewell Shops in Towns Near Kacharam ...................................................................... 164
Figure 43 - Tubewell Shops in Towns Near Kacharam 2 ................................................................... 164
Figure 44 - A Price List for Tubewells by Depth ............................................................................... 166
Figure 45 - Deep Tubewell Density Map of India .............................................................................. 168
Figure 46 - Groundwater Electricity Costs by State in India .............................................................. 170
Figure 47 - Cotton Irrigated Area Telangana 1998-2018 .................................................................... 172
Figure 48 - Cotton Irrigated Area Nalgonda 1998-2018 ..................................................................... 172
List of tables
Table 1 - Green Revolution vs Liberalised Green Revolution in India ................................................ 52
Table 2 - Socio-economic Profile of Kacharam .................................................................................... 97
Table 3 - Data Collection Summary ................................................................................................... 101
Table 4 - Fieldwork Data Summary .................................................................................................... 102
Table 5 - Interview Household Selection Criteria............................................................................... 104
Table 6 - Bt Cotton Outcomes ............................................................................................................ 124
Table 7 - Tubewell Outcomes in Kacharam ....................................................................................... 155
Table 8 - Tubewell Deepening ............................................................................................................ 165
Table 9 - Non-farm Incomes ............................................................................................................... 179
Table 10 - Farming Futures Survey .................................................................................................... 182
Table 11 - Net Household Incomes in Kacharam ............................................................................... 191
7
Abstract
This thesis argues that since the 1980s, agricultural policy in developing countries has
restructured around a new, “Liberalised Green Revolution”, premised on the principles of
economic liberalisation. It retains the same agricultural development model as the public sector
led Green Revolution from the 1960s, linking intensification of soils, crops and water with
higher productivity, economic growth, and the structural transformation of the economy.
However, this time, policy makers have placed the private sector as the focal point initiating
agrarian change, positioning the public sector as facilitators of market intermediaries who lead
the provisioning of inputs, seeds, irrigation, credit, and extension services. Most crucially,
proponents of the Liberalised Green Revolution have targeted the spatial expanse of farmers in
dryland subsistence smallholder settings, encompassing 40% of the world’s area and 1.5 billion
farmers across 55 countries who often subsist on less than $2 a day.
This thesis builds upon theoretical insights from political ecology and agrarian political
economy in theorising the Liberalised Green Revolution. I study the intersection of
environment, credit/debt relations, market intermediaries and governments in an economic
liberalisation context to critique normative agricultural modernisation models, underexplored
together in the literature thus far. Combining these together, I show that in certain contexts,
market intermediary led agricultural intensification in dryland smallholder settings accelerates
indebtedness, stagnating yields and deagrarianisation.
This thesis applies the Liberalised Green Revolution framework to India, where since economic
liberalisation in the 1990s, public sector retrenchment in agriculture has facilitated private
intermediaries to aggressively promote and disburse seeds, inputs, credit, irrigation, and
extension services in markets. Bt cotton, a pest resistant cotton biotechnology brought to India
by Monsanto in 2002, accelerated India to become the world largest cotton grower covering
48% of the global Bt cotton area, cultivated primarily by almost 6 million smallholder farmers.
Similarly, private sector led smallholder groundwater irrigation adoption since the 1990s
propelled India into the biggest groundwater user globally, consuming 37% of global
groundwater. Both agricultural technologies therefore are regarded by proponents as the
apotheosis of private sector smallholder development in India.
The thesis conducted eight months of village level ethnographic fieldwork via 84 interviews
and 151 household surveys in the south Indian state of Telangana, an agricultural backwater
that transformed into a smallholder Bt cotton and groundwater agrocapitalist system within two
decades. Yet, my fieldwork found the Liberalised Green Revolution increased technology
adoption but simultaneously saw stagnating Bt cotton and groundwater irrigation outcomes in
ecologically fragile terrain. Contrary to agricultural modernisation theory assumptions, the
thesis found that input and irrigation intermediaries heavily marketed the capital and resource
intensive technologies on cheap credit to the detriment of smallholders. For the poorest farmers
in Telangana, groundwater well failure rates of 89% and losses from Bt cotton for 65% of
households caused long-term stagnation in farming incomes, chronic indebtedness, and the
eventual abandonment of farming as a primary income. Farmers subsequently became trapped
within risk-indebtedness treadmills, doubling down on technology adoption to earn cash and
repay mounting high interest debts from farming losses. This drove environmental degradation
of multiple well and harvest failures and indebtedness further in agroecologically barren
landscapes that did not bring expected yields.
The chasm between the promise and reality of the Liberalised Green Revolution has dried up
farming as a viable livelihood for smallholders in certain rainfed areas in India amidst a bleak
future scenario of intensifying climatic extremes. It has forced farmers to rely on meagre non-
farm incomes to repay debts and earn incomes at a time when India also faces a jobs crisis in
the non-farm sector.
8
Declaration
No portion of the work referred to in the thesis has been submitted in support of an application
for another degree or qualification of this or any other university or other institute of learning.
Copyright statement
The author of this thesis (including any appendices and/or schedules to this thesis) owns certain
copyright or related rights in it (the “Copyright”) and s/he has given The University of
Manchester certain rights to use such Copyright, including for administrative purposes.
Copies of this thesis, either in full or in extracts and whether in hard or electronic copy, may
be made only in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (as amended)
and regulations issued under it or, where appropriate, in accordance with licensing agreements
which the University has from time to time. This page must form part of any such copies made.
The ownership of certain Copyright, patents, designs, trademarks, and other intellectual
property (the “Intellectual Property”) and any reproductions of copyright works in the thesis,
for example graphs and tables (“Reproductions”), which may be described in this thesis, may
not be owned by the author and may be owned by third parties. Such Intellectual Property and
Reproductions cannot and must not be made available for use without the prior written
permission of the owner(s) of the relevant Intellectual Property and/or Reproductions.
Further information on the conditions under which disclosure, publication and
commercialisation of this thesis, the Copyright and any Intellectual Property and/or
Reproductions described in it may take place is available in the University IP Policy (see
http://documents.manchester.ac.uk/DocuInfo.aspx?DocID=2442 0), in any relevant Thesis
restriction declarations deposited in the University Library, The University Library’s
regulations (see http://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/about/regulations/) and in The
University’s policy on Presentation of Theses.
9
List of acronyms
Anganwadi – School nutrition programme
BJP - Bharatiya Janata Party
Brahmin – Traditional scholar, priest caste
Bt - Bacillus thuringiensis
CGWB - Central Groundwater Board
DES - Department of Economics and Statistics
DNA - Deoxyribonucleic acid
FC - Forward caste
FDI - Foreign Direct Investment
GDP - Gross Domestic Product
GHG - Greenhouse gas
GMO - Genetically Modified Organism
Golla - Sheep and goat herder sub caste within Other Backward Caste
Goud - Palm wine tapper sub caste within Other Backward Caste
Gram Panchayat – Village council
GSDP - Gross State Domestic Product
GVA – Gross Value Added
Ha – Hectares
ICRIER – Indian Council for Research on International Economic Relations
IFI - International Financial Institution
IMF - International Monetary Fund
ISAAA - International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications
Kamma – Traditional cultivating and landlord caste
KCR - Kalvakuntla Chandrashekhar Rao
Kharif – Wet season
Komati - Traditional business and trading caste
Lambadi – Traditional forest dwelling nomad tribe
10
Madiga - Artisanal tannery, leatherworker and handicraft making sub caste within Scheduled
Caste
Mandal – Sub district administrative division
Mala - Agricultural labour sub caste within Scheduled Caste
MoWR - Ministry of Water Resources, Government of India
NEET - Not in employment education or training
NFHS - National Family Health Survey
NGO - Non-Governmental Organisation
NITI Ayog - National Institution for Transforming India
NSSO - National Sample Survey Office
OBC - Other Backward Caste
OECD - Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development
PVC - Polyvinyl chloride
Rabi – Dry season
Reddy – Traditional cultivator and landlord caste
R&D - Research and Development
RQ - Research Question
Sarpanch – Village leader
SC - Scheduled Caste
ST - Scheduled Tribe
TDP - Telugu Desam Party
Thanda - Traditional Scheduled Tribe Hamlet
TRS - Telangana Rashtra Samithi
USA – United States of America
UK – United Kingdom
USD – United States Dollar
UN – United Nations
Velama – Traditional cultivator and landlord caste
WTO - World Trade Organisation
11
Acknowledgements
This thesis is first and foremost dedicated to the people of Kacharam. Without the insights,
experiences, patience, help, energy, and time you gave to me between January and July in 2019
I would not be writing this thesis right now. You gave me everything and yet I can only give
back my gratitude. To my research assistant and friend Yadagiri, thank you for being the most
patient, helpful, inquisitive, and conscientious research assistant I could ask for. You opened
doors I never could for the fieldwork with your knowledge and your willingness to cater to my
every request (often food based) made my stay in Devarakonda more enjoyable. It became not
just a research trip but a chance to appreciate the culture and people of Telangana I never had
the chance to before, living outside of India for all these years. Finally, in India, I would like
to thank my extended family that took care of me in Hyderabad and Mahabubnagar. Radha
chinnamma and Madhu chinnanna thank you for your love and hospitality. Returning to
Hyderabad and Mahabubnagar each weekend on the three-hour RTC bus journey from
Devarakonda was worth it for the time I spent at home with you all. Thank you for taking care
of me.
I’d also like to thank my supervisors Admos Chimhowu and Ben Neimark for taking me on as
a fresh faced, excitable 24 year old in 2017, and moulding me into a more critical and concise
researcher. Thank you for providing me with excellent, timely, and critical guidance and
feedback throughout the thesis. Thank you, Phil Woodhouse for being a mentor and for your
rigorous and challenging questions and comments in all my annual reviews, it was a great
preparation ground.
Onto my PhD friends, thank you Sawyer, Daniel, Lena, Sarah, Matt, Erika, Amish and Emrah
for sharing the PhD process with me. It was made the more worthwhile for it, for all the highs
and lows we experienced and our discussions over lunches or drinks after work. My time in
Manchester would also not be the same without my Maine Road housemates Ashley and Mike,
thank you for all the chats, walks, movie nights and for making my time at home so fun. A big,
big, thank you also to my pals Max, AQ, Maillie, George, Richie, Jon and Raghav for all the
laughs, nights out, walks, Zoom quizzes, house parties and hang outs in London and
Manchester over the last three and a half years.
12
Anil, you have been a role model, big brother figure and best friend to me. Thank you for
inspiring me to do the PhD and our time in Glasgow together. Thank you for all the chats we
have had over the years, the advice, and endless laughs. I am so happy to have you always be
there.
My family. Amma, nanna and Neeha you have trusted and supported my every decision on this
path and allowed me to follow my passions in life, unlike the pressures other Indian families
put their children under. This means the world to me I am so lucky. Thank you for giving me
the confidence and determination to do everything to the best of my ability and giving me every
opportunity in life I could have asked for; I promise this is only the beginning.
Finally, Em. It has been a wonderful journey. We have come through so much. Thank you for
all you have done for me and continue to do. For the support, companionship, adventures,
laughter, culinary delights, and most importantly being the biggest believer in my abilities,
especially in these last six months. Here’s to the next step.
13
Chapter 1 – Introduction
1.1 Introduction
India was ground zero for agrarian change in the 20th century with the implementation of the
Green Revolution (Harwood, 2019). Emerging in response to looming famine and low
productivity agriculture in the 1960s, the Green Revolution involved the Indian government
importing new high yielding wheat and rice seeds and investing in irrigation, inputs, credit, and
extension services in agroecologically favourable regions and rich classes of farmers (Pingali,
2012). The sum of all these factors increased cereal crop yields and economic growth in India,
transforming the country from a food importer to exporter and towards structural
transformation of its economy (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). Similar increases in agricultural
yields and production also took place in rice and wheat in Mexico, the Philippines and Pakistan,
therein providing a blueprint for agricultural development through technology and agrarian
change (Stone, 2019).
The political economy context of agriculture however has changed irrevocably in India and
beyond since the 1980s under the rubric of economic liberalisation, defined as:
“new political, economic, and social arrangements within society that emphasize
market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual responsibility…the
extension of competitive markets into all areas of life, including the economy, politics,
and society” (Springer, 2016: p2).
Facing decades of mounting debt levels, hyperinflation, and balance of payment problems from
oil price shocks, numerous developing countries in the 1980s were forced to seek an economic
bailout by the World Bank and IMF (De Janvry, 2010; Banerjee and Duflo, 2019). In exchange,
governments such as in India agreed to undergo a “structural adjustment” of their economy. In
the agricultural sector this included reducing public sector expenditure in credit, seeds, inputs,
and irrigation provision, alongside trade liberalisation, reorienting cropping patterns to export
cash crops, reducing import tariffs and providing a greater role to the private sector in input
and output markets (Reddy, 2006). In this thesis, I explore the political economy of this new
epoch of the Green Revolution I term the “Liberalised Green Revolution”, a private sector led,
decentralised agricultural modernisation phase since economic liberalisation. Political
economy for this thesis uses Akram-Lodhi’s (2018: p1) definition:
14
“Changes in: agricultural production, most notably the distribution of assets, the capture
of the benefits of technical change by social forces, and processes of commodification;
the accumulation that emerges out of changing technical coefficients of production; and
the political implications, across a myriad variety of forms, of changing patterns of
production and growth.”
Like the original Green Revolution, the dominant narrative of improving productivity per acre
and output through the application of biochemical intensification, mechanisation, high yielding
seed varieties and irrigation remained (Moseley, 2017). However, under economic
liberalisation, the emphasis has been not only food security but the promotion of commercial
crops for exports to maximise profitability and economic growth towards structural
transformation (Van Der Ploeg, 2014).
Developing country government, development aid donors, bilateral and multilateral
organisations and NGOs have increasingly pivoted towards a private sector lead role in
improving agricultural productivity and economic growth in developing countries (Schnurr,
2019). This is to fill the gap of the government and promote new genetically modified (GM)
seeds, inputs, credit, irrigation, and extension services through decentralised market price
competition between private intermediaries and agribusiness (Zhou, 2010). Most importantly,
proponents have targeted subsistence smallholder farmers (farmers that own less than 2ha of
land) in marginal environments which are afflicted by poor productivity soils, erratic rainfall,
climatic extremes of drought and floods and rural poverty (Tripp, 2001; Pender, 2007). These
areas have been historically neglected in agricultural policy making but are numerically
significant, covering 40% of the world’s geographical area, spread across 55 countries and
supporting 1.5 billion farming livelihoods, the majority of which live on below $2 per day (Dar
et al, 2011; Kumar et al, 2019).
The thesis explores how smallholder farmers in marginal areas in India respond to agricultural
intensification and how the Liberalised Green Revolution shapes rural livelihoods and the
economy. Drawing upon insights from agrarian political economy (Jan and Harriss-White,
2012; Lerche, 2015; Levien et al, 2018) and political ecology (Watts, 1983; Taylor, 2013a,
2013b, Luna, 2020), I contest the assumption by proponents of agricultural modernisation that
agricultural technologies are scale and spatially neutral, working for smallholders as with large
farmers to accelerate agricultural growth (Birner and Resnick, 2010). Instead, I theorise in the
Liberalised Green Revolution framework that agricultural commercialisation by smallholder
15
farmers in marginal settings can in some instances counterintuitively lead to yield stagnation
and incomes in the long term due to the agroecological unsuitability for intensification.
I apply the Liberalised Green Revolution framework to the case study of India and the two
technologies: Bt cotton, a pest resistant transgenic hybrid cotton variety engineered by
Monsanto, the US agribusiness giant, and approved in India in the 2000s (Flachs, 2016) and
tubewell irrigation, a form of groundwater irrigation that exploded in India since the 1990s
(Lall et al, 2020). These technologies are considered the flagship examples of decentralised
market led technology adoption in agriculture in India by economists and policymakers (Qaim
et al, 2009; Shah, 2010). Used together, the technologies are predicted to maximise yields and
increase profitability in rainfed smallholder settings (Glover, 2010a; Sharma et al, 2018).
Private expansion in India of these two technologies on the back of smallholder adoption in the
last few decades propelled India to become the biggest cotton grower by area and production
globally (Gutierrez et al, 2020), as well as the biggest groundwater user (Gleeson et al, 2016).
To study the political economy of the Liberalised Green Revolution I conducted a mixed
methods ethnographic case study fieldwork consisting of 84 interviews and 151 household
surveys in the state of Telangana, a smallholder semi-arid agricultural state in South India
(Aggarwal, 2008). Telangana liberalised its agricultural economy comparatively rapidly
relative to other states in India in the 1990s, transforming its agricultural growth in the process
(Vakulabharanam, 2005). Liberalisation of credit, irrigation, and input sectors (Mooij, 2007;
Taylor, 2013a) and the explicit promotion of biotechnology by the Chief Minister Chandra
Babu Naidu (Bowles, 2003) brought a private sector driven commercialisation of smallholder
farming via Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation, becoming the second biggest crop by area in the
state in two decades (Kranthi and Stone, 2020) and the single biggest source of irrigation
respectively (Rao, 2014).
This thesis will address the following three research questions:
1) What are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in the Liberalised Green
Revolution in Telangana?
2) How has tubewell irrigation changed the political economy of agriculture in
Telangana?
3) What are the implications of the Liberalised Green Revolution for the future of
agricultural livelihoods in Telangana?
16
This thesis argues that technology does not exist in the abstract but is saturated with the
prevailing historical, political, social, economic, and geographical contexts (Sultana, 2013;
Glover et al, 2019). Technologies are rooted in material realities of socially differentiated
power relations, and mediated by factors such as gender, class, or social status (Ribot and
Peluso, 2003; Bernstein, 2010). This thesis explains how agricultural commercialisation can
potentially be adverse for smallholder farmers through implementing technological fixes in
contexts far away from the optimal conditions in which they are designed to work in (Glover
et al, 2017). In doing so, I also explore the long term economic and environmental implications
it has on rural livelihoods (Ellis, 2010).
To demonstrate why the Liberalised Green Revolution does not necessarily achieve an increase
in incomes and yields in the long term in marginal smallholder settings, I consider four key
intersecting political economy factors, which have been underexplored in the literature with
some exceptions (Taylor, 2013a, 2013b). First, I show how agricultural commercialisation can
in certain rainfed, semi-arid contexts fail to replicate in agroecological settings featuring
unsuitable soils, climate, and rainfall, and can exacerbate environmental degradation of
farmers’ resource base (Lopez, 2002).
Next, I show how barriers to agricultural intensification in marginal growing areas can become
entwined within credit/debt relations to informal credit and full market prices for financing
agricultural investments, relative to the original Green Revolution (Luna, 2019). In marginal
settings, the high input and production costs of commercial crops may not match the yields to
repay investments on credit (Byerlee et al, 1993). In this instance, rising indebtedness forces
farmers to further intensify their farm operations to earn cash, but also amplifies environmental
risk keeping them within debt relations to creditors in a “reproductive squeeze” (Watts, 1983).
This leaves them few options but to rely on non-farm livelihoods to earn a living and repay
debts (Natarajan et al, 2019), which nuances the linear prediction by agricultural modernisation
theorists linking technology, agrarian change and productivity led non-farm transitions (Chang,
2009).
Third, I posit that in the Liberalised Green Revolution, private intermediaries in many areas
take a lead role in providing credit, inputs, and extension services and output markets to farmers
in a context of a retrenched public sector under liberalisation (Ramamurthy, 2011). Private
market intermediaries for this thesis are placed at the centre of the agricultural
commercialisation process in the Liberalised Green Revolution.
17
Finally, I show how governments under the Liberalised Green Revolution tend to facilitate
market activity in agriculture as an economic development goal and also intervene with welfare
policies and subsidies to encourage this, for example formal credit disbursal and irrigation
subsidies (Rajan et al, 2020). Putting these four factors together, I construct a political economy
framework of the Liberalised Green Revolution to show why normative models of agricultural
commercialisation need contextualising according to the agroecological scenario for
smallholder outcomes. Political economy and political ecology scholars have studied the link
between technology adoption, environmental risk, and debt (Taylor, 2011; Gerber, 2013;
Ramprasad, 2019), but I further study the lead roles of market intermediaries and governments
in understanding occurrences of unintended negative agricultural technology adoption
outcomes for smallholder farmers, instead increasing non-farm income reliance.
To explore the political economy of the Liberalised Green Revolution, this chapter will be
structured as follows. First, the chapter will overview the theoretical framework of the
Liberalised Green Revolution for the thesis. Following this, the chapter evaluates the political
economy debates on Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation and the implications of the Liberalised
Green Revolution for future agricultural livelihoods. This section also identifies the gaps in
existing debates in the literature and outlines how the thesis contributes novel findings.
Furthermore, I justify the choice of Telangana as a case study state for the thesis, providing a
background of the agricultural context. Finally, the chapter provides a chapter outline of the
subsequent chapters to follow.
1.2 Theorising the Liberalised Green Revolution
Since its implementation in the 1960s, the Green Revolution has served as the blueprint for
public sector led agricultural development in developing countries. The core tenets of this are
increasing yields and production per hectare with the application of biochemical fertiliser,
pesticides, high yielding seeds and irrigation, financed by credit (Patel, 2013). This forms a
crucial part of agricultural modernisation, of rising productivity leading to economic growth
(Musabanganji et al, 2016). A major proponent of this model was Mellor (1976), who explained
that technological intensification in agriculture increased agricultural production and incomes
for farmers, raising consumption demand for non-agricultural goods and services. Over time,
the high productivity and efficiency gains in agriculture would reduce the employment of the
workforce in agriculture and enable a structural transformation of the economy out of
agriculture into industrialisation (Byerlee et al, 2008).
18
Under the Liberalised Green Revolution since the 1980s, the linear concatenation of
technology, agrarian change and economic growth has continued, but this time, policy makers
have placed the private sector as main implementers of agricultural development (Moseley,
2017). This refers to private market intermediaries of creditors, input firms and agribusiness
(Aga, 2018). Proponents envisage that decentralised private sector market competition, and
greater integration of smallholder farmers into global value chains via commodity crops can
transform the subsistence farmer in marginal areas into agrocapitalist entrepreneurs (Fairbarn
et al, 2014; Levien et al, 2018; Bergius et al, 2018).
Taking a more critical perspective, this thesis engages with agrarian political economy and
political ecology scholarship to point out that smallholder intensification in marginal areas
presents challenges, due to the social, environmental, and economic conditions of technology
adoption (Smale, 2017). I demonstrate that agricultural commercialisation does not always
linearly improve smallholder farming outcomes in marginal settings in the long term. Instead,
long term yields and economic outcomes can sometimes stagnate or decline, leading to higher
indebtedness, environmental degradation and non-farm livelihood dependence. I present the
framework in Figure 1 below.
Figure 1 - Liberalised Green Revolution Framework
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2021)
19
I locate the causality of why this is the case down to four intersecting factors. The first is the
agroecological constraints of marginal areas of erratic rainfall, drought and flood propensity
and poor productivity soils unconducive to long term intensification (Lopez, 2002). In these
settings, capital and input intensive crops face high risk of harvest failures relative to the
optimal climate and water conditions in which commercial crops are tested in (Glover et al,
2017).
Second, the heighted environmental risk ties with financial risk for the smallholder farmer, as
the capital and input intensive crops are often financed by high interest informal credit, as
smallholder farmers cannot afford cash investments (Jaleta et al, 2009). In marginal settings,
unproductive returns on their investments in unsuitable soil and climate conditions means
farmers often can become indebted to intermediaries. Additionally, faced with rising farming
and household consumption costs in a market economy (Jakobsen, 2019), farmers become
compelled to continue commercial cultivation to recoup their crop debts but, in the process,
can be further entrenched into debt relations the more they intensify. In this particular scenario,
agricultural commercialisation may not create economic growth or rising productivity, but
adverse technology adoption can induce farmers to seek non-farm daily wage labour to cope
with farm losses (Harriss-White, 2020).
Third, under economic liberalisation, the diminished role of the public sector in favour of
market intermediaries makes the latter the lead provider in credit, inputs, irrigation, and seeds
(Srinivasulu, 2015). Often, the motivation of market intermediaries is to maximise profitability
through higher sales of inputs and credit, regardless of the agroecological suitability of the
technologies (Aga, 2019). Agricultural commercialisation occurs through interlocked private
factor markets, where farmers finance inputs on credit, in exchange for purchasing the crop at
harvest at a guaranteed price from the intermediary (Jan and Harriss-White, 2012). In marginal
areas however, this can increase debt and interest repayments for smallholder farmers to
creditors if they achieve low yields relative to investment costs (Taylor, 2011).
Finally, the role of government. On the one hand, governments in agricultural policy emphasise
the market driven agricultural development and a relaxation of regulations in agriculture to
achieve economic growth. Concurrently, for political ends, governments also invest in welfare
programmes and subsidies as palliative measures to keep smallholder farmers afloat through
loan waivers or formal credit disbursal, amidst the market led agricultural intensification
persisting (Vasavi, 2019). Taken together, I argue using the political economy framework of
20
the Liberalised Green Revolution that agricultural commercialisation in marginal smallholder
settings may potentially lead to adverse outcomes in the long run. This finding is pertinent
given the large populations of marginal smallholder farmers globally that are being integrated
into agricultural commercialisation programmes in contemporary development discourse
(Byerlee et al 2008), for example the attempts to bring a private and GM technology led
“African Green Revolution” to the continent in the last decade (Moseley et al, 2017).
Next, the thesis focuses on two key technologies of the Liberalised Green Revolution in India,
Bt cotton (see Chapter 2 and 4) and tubewells (see Chapter 2 and 5).
1.3 Bt cotton
A key private sector innovation in agriculture since the 1980s has been the ‘gene revolution’
(Parayil, 2003). These comprise advances in genetic biotechnologies for commercial crop
breeding by private agribusiness such as Monsanto, a US agribusiness giant, with the goal of
increasing technology adoption in smallholder contexts, food security and economic growth
(Glover, 2010b; Moseley et al, 2017). Bred for traits including drought and pest resistance and
higher yields, biotechnology proponents envision these crop breeding advances as the future
of smallholder agriculture in developing countries. Planted by almost 17 million farmers across
24 developing countries since 1996 (ISAAA, 2019), the three biggest crops by area in the gene
revolution in developing countries are soy and maize in Brazil and Bt cotton in India (ibid).
India was historically a major of cotton producer globally since the 16th century, but witnessed
a rapid increase in yields and area the 1990s through the introduction of new high yielding crop
breeding techniques (Menon and Uzramma, 2017). Public research organisations created
higher yielding hybrid varieties of cotton in the 1970s in Gujarat, but it only took off in the
1990s (Stone et al, 2007). Liberalisation in agriculture in the 1990s enabled the entry of private
sector input firms that iterated, patented and marketed hybrid cotton to smallholder farmers in
India via private markets, selling thousands of cotton seed varieties (ibid).
India’s membership in the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995 also opened the cotton
market in international commodities for farmers (Vakulabharanam, 2004). Supported by
private input firms who sold, marketed and financed cotton investments on low collateral
informal credit to farmers, cotton adoption amongst smallholders began rapidly spreading in
rainfed semi-arid areas of India (Ramamurthy, 2011). By the early 2000s however, hybrid
cotton was afflicted by pest problems, failing harvests, and diminishing returns on investment
21
relative to pesticide usage, as cotton contributed only 5% of the cropped area in India but used
up 50% of the pesticides of all crops (Flachs, 2020).
As a technological fix for hybrid cotton, the Indian government approved and imported Bt
cotton in 2002, a pest resistant GM cotton strain created by Monsanto. Bt cotton adoption in
India reflected wider GM commercial crop varieties adopted in Africa, South Asia and Latin
America in the 2000s (Kouser and Qaim, 2013; Schnurr, 2019; Norberg, 2020). Due to Bt
cotton, India jumped from 3rd to 1st globally for cotton production at over 6 million tonnes, and
more importantly it was grown by 6 million mostly smallholder farmers in rainfed and semi-
arid states in India (ISAAA, 2019).
NITI Ayog (2015: p21-22), the Indian government’s economic policy thinktank, commented
on Bt cotton’s success and the role of GM crops as a key driver of agricultural growth, stating:
“The success of Bt cotton in India and many more GM seeds elsewhere in the world
testifies to the potential of GM technology in giving a major boost to productivity in
agriculture… As a part of its strategy to bring a Second Green Revolution, India must
return to permitting proven and well-tested GM technologies with adequate
safeguards… as conventional technologies have not helped in raising output to keep
pace with country’s requirements.”
Though Bt cotton brought higher incomes initially for millions of farmers, numerous scholars
in the literature contest its legacy (Stone and Flachs, 2018; Kranthi and Stone, 2020). In
controlled field trials, proponents of Bt cotton found reductions in pesticide usage and costs
and higher yields relative to earlier hybrid cotton strains (Qaim et al, 2009; Gruere and
Sengupta, 2011). Therein, the rapid smallholder adoption of Bt cotton self-evidently showed
smallholder farmer’s desire for higher yields and market prices (Herring and Rao, 2012).
Political ecology and development studies scholars on the other hand pointed to Bt cotton’s
numerous flaws from their ethnographic work (see Chapter 2 and 4). A key problem was the
incentives for intermediaries in promoting and selling Bt cotton within a deregulated market
(Ramamurthy, 2011). Thousands of near identical varieties sold by local input firms and rapid
turnover of seeds made farmers dependent on input dealers for applying the correct quantity of
pesticide and fertiliser, resulting in what Stone et al (2014) called “agricultural deskilling”. For
input dealers, profit incentives saw input dealers provide extension advice prescribing overuse
of fertilisers and pesticides, earning more interest on credit disbursed to smallholder farmers
(Chaudhuri, 2019).
22
Furthermore, the majority of Bt cotton grown globally was in marginal and rainfed conditions
(see Chapters 4, 5 and 7), which increased financial risk for farmers in being unable to repay
their investments on the input and capital intensive crop (Gray and Dowd Uribe, 2013). For
instance, aggregate figures in adopting countries in India, Burkina Faso and South Africa show
yield increases with Bt cotton levelling off within a decade after being introduced (Schnurr,
2012; Luna, 2020; Kranthi and Stone, 2020). In India, outbreaks of new pests and monsoon
variability in rainfed conditions have stagnated yields in the past 5-10 years, while fertiliser
and seed consumption for Bt cotton keeps increasing (Ramani et al, 2015).
This thesis will address key literature gaps that currently exist on Bt cotton. First, I will
investigate the role of private input dealers and governments in driving unsuitable adoption
choices for Bt cotton with regards to irrigation, debt and cropping patterns. I also look at the
implications for indebtedness from Bt cotton investments and how climate and agroecological
conditions affect Bt cotton yields in India and Telangana in rainfed environments (see Chapter
4 and 5). Finally, the thesis contributes to agrarian political economy literature on Bt cotton by
exploring the long-term economic and social outcomes of Bt cotton adoption for example
increasing non-farm reliance amongst smallholder farmers from unremunerative investments
and rising debts from the crop in rainfed conditions.
1.4 Tubewell irrigation
The second technology of the Liberalised Green Revolution I explore in this thesis is tubewell
irrigation. Groundwater irrigation had existed for millennia in India through rudimentary hand
dug and oxen powered wells that extracted water from underground aquifers (Shah, 2010).
Since the 1990s, liberalisation accelerated the adoption of a new technology, tubewells, that
relied on electric submersible pumps that extracted water from 5x the depths and 3x the acreage
in comparison to hand dug wells (Narayanamoorthy, 2015; MoWR, 2017).
Temporally, tubewell irrigation took off in India since the 1990s via the entry of decentralised
price competition between private irrigation firms (see Chapter 2 and 5) that sold pumps and
pipes, drilled for groundwater, and provided irrigation extension (Birkenholtz, 2007). Price
competition drove down tubewell prices from $10,000 to $1,000 between the 1970s and 2000s
(Freed and Freed, 2002; Jacoby, 2017), in addition to informal credit making tubewells
accessible for smallholder farmers without adequate collateral (Vasavi, 2020). Furthermore,
rural electrification in India also helped create stable power supply to electric submersible
pumps that powered tubewells, amongst other welfare benefits for rural households (Sidhu et
23
al, 2020). The increase in tubewell area therefore “democratised” irrigation for smallholder
farmers, reducing rural poverty via increasing agricultural productivity in marginal growing
environments (Narayanamoorthy, 2006; Taylor, 2013).
Via these developments, groundwater’s share of absolute irrigated area increased from 5% in
the 1950s, to 67% today (DES India, 2018). Groundwater irrigation is spread over 20 million
wells in 90 million households in India, making it the biggest groundwater user in the world,
making up 37% of global groundwater consumption (Sidhu et al, 2020; Gleeson et al, 2020).
Furthermore, as the MoWR (2017) notes, 87% of all wells in India in 2013 were owned by
smallholder farmers, corroborating the observation of a smallholder groundwater revolution in
agriculture since liberalisation. Globally, groundwater irrigation makes up 43% of the irrigated
area for agriculture (Siebert et al, 2010), the largest freshwater source and used by 2 billion
people (Cuthbert et al, 2019). Between 1960 and 2000, groundwater abstraction triple
worldwide, fuelled by irrigation expansion in India and China (Wada et al, 2012).
However, 66% of the groundwater area in India is in hard rock aquifers (Mukherjee, 2018) (see
Chapters 2, 5 and 7). This aquifer type has low rainfall recharge via percolation, high rates of
runoff and intermittent water availability from the rock substrata (Marechal, 2010), requiring
multiple drill attempts to successfully access groundwater (Hora et al, 2019). For aquifers
groundwater levels to be replenished, the monsoon is a crucial source, making up 67% of total
aquifer recharge (Asoka et al, 2018). In semi-arid areas however, rainfall is erratic and laterite
soil types dominate, which are prone to poor infiltration capacity, meaning much of the
rainwater is lost through evaporation in hot and dry weather (Bassi et 2008). The growth of
tubewells in a scenario of increasing climate and monsoon variability (Mishra et al, 2020) and
the inherent problems from groundwater development in hard rock aquifer areas demonstrates
the hydrogeological risks from tubewell expansion in the Liberalised Green Revolution.
In addition, liberalisation enabled the competition and growth of tubewell firms in India but
this took place in a lax regulatory environment in both electricity and water use for
groundwater. In India today, 85% of the 20 million tubewells in use are powered by electricity
(Sidhu et al, 2020). Despite liberalisation of markets in irrigation, political incentives by state
governments in India heavily subsidised electricity prices to appease groundwater adopters.
This has exacerbated groundwater depletion and electricity consumption in India, forming what
Dubash (2002) calls the “energy-irrigation nexus”. As tubewell expansion in India occurred at
such a fast rate, it became logistically infeasible for governments to administer electricity
24
charges to farmers, as well as creating political constraints for state governments (Scott and
Sharma, 2009). The overexploitation problems caused by electricity subsidies in India are also
prevalent in South Asia (Shah et al, 2006) and the Middle East (Karimi et al, 2012; Al-Naber
and Molle, 2017).
From the farmers side, the desire to improve profitability from irrigated cash crop agriculture,
availability of cheap credit and nominally “free” extraction costs in India deepened socio-
ecological vulnerabilities from tubewells (Sishodia et al, 2016). In water stressed semi-arid and
hard rock aquifers areas, intensive well drilling competition for scarce groundwater have
created numerous tubewell failures and mounting debts for smallholder farmers in India (see
Chapters 2, 5 and 7). Intensifying droughts and rainfall variability from climate change (Mishra
et al, 2020), markets and public policy have engrained farmers in debt relationships with
creditors. The overreliance on informal credit to finance capital intensive tubewells and cash
crops in rainfed areas have in some instances failed to realise their potential (Taylor, 2013a).
In this thesis, I tackle several gaps in the literature on tubewells. For instance, aside from a few
authors (Taylor, 2013a; Vasavi, 2020), ethnographic work into hard rock aquifers in semi-arid
India has remained underexplored, despite constituting a significant proportion of the
agricultural area in India (Mukherjee, 2018). Finally, the thesis brings new findings on the role
of private irrigation firms in promoting, selling, and providing extension advice on tubewells
to farmers in India, which only a few scholars have studied ethnographically (Birkenholtz,
2007). The limited remit of groundwater departments to dispense water and crop management
advice to farmers has only exacerbated the problem in the Liberalised Green Revolution
(Pahuja et al, 2010), leaving farmers to rely on irrigation firms for help, whose profit incentives
are to increase irrigation sales despite risky hydrogeological settings. The thesis therefore
positions private irrigation firms in enabling the adoption and overexploitation of aquifers
through tubewell expansion in water stressed regions of India (see Chapter 5), in conjunction
with government electricity subsidies.
25
1.5 Non-farm livelihoods
Despite the agricultural commercialisation in parts of India in the Liberalised Green
Revolution, agriculture as a sector has diminished in its share of GDP, pushing farmers to rely
on non-farm incomes. The primary cause of this non-farm diversification in rural livelihoods
are instances of un-remunerative returns from agricultural intensification in marginal areas (see
Chapters 4, 5, 6 and 7). Tubewell overexploitation for example has forced farmers into greater
indebtedness from agriculture and to rely on non-farm livelihoods (Jacoby, 2017; Blakeslee et
al, 2020). Thereby agricultural employment in India remains high at 43% (DES India, 2018),
but is a form of ‘disguised underemployment’ with farmers relying more on wage labour in
construction and agriculture than cultivating crops (Himanshu, 2019).
In rural India, non-farm incomes make up 65% of household incomes (Chand et al, 2017).
Within rural households, increasing access to education for younger generations has also
propagated a major intergenerational shift in social mobility and aspirations towards non-farm
livelihoods and away from agriculture, owing to their smallholder farmers parent’s risky forays
into agricultural commercialisation (Jakimow, 2014; 2016) (see Chapter 2, 6 and 7). The share
of graduates amongst the educated population in India now stands at over 25%, a figure alike
developed countries (Jose Thomas, 2020). With the encouragement of their parents, attaining
education and exiting agriculture for salaried jobs has been the top priority for many rural youth
in India (Agarwal and Agrawal, 2017).
The bulk of non-farm livelihoods in India however, both to educated rural youth and to farmers,
are informal, seasonal, and insecure (Mehrotra and Parida, 2019). For the older farming
generation, unskilled wage labour is often the only choice available to earn a supplementary
income to agriculture (Jakimow, 2014). For younger, educated generations too, the aspiration
for a formal job has been unfulfilled, as India sits deep within a period of jobless economic
growth since the global financial crisis in 2008 (Mehra, 2019) (see Chapter 6). This has left
rural youth few options but to engage in menial work such as rickshaw driving or drop out of
the labour force altogether (Sanghera, 2019). This phenomenon of youth underemployment
and unemployment amidst demographically young countries is also evident in Ethiopia and
Uganda (Ahaibwe et al, 2013; Bezu and Holden, 2014).
In this thesis I connect agricultural commercialisation with non-farm livelihood transitions, and
subsequently ask how farming households cope given the unremunerative incomes from both.
This thesis also looks at agricultural commercialisation as a driver of intrahousehold aspirations
26
for social mobility and prosperity, linking investments made in education by farmers for their
children with unproductive technology investments in agriculture (see Chapter 6 and 7). The
thesis therefore looks at how failures and debts from the Liberalised Green Revolution drove
farmers and youth to rely on non-farm livelihoods to survive, but structural labour market
problems in India have left few viable and secure sources of income.
1.6 Telangana case study
To analyse the effects of the Liberalised Green Revolution in India, this thesis uses the case
study of Telangana, a state in South India. I chose Telangana for this thesis as smallholder
intensification has rapidly progressed since economic liberalisation in the 1990s (Aggarwal,
2008) (see Chapter 3). Originally a region within the state of Andhra Pradesh, Telangana was
an historically rainfed and marginal subsistence farming environment (Pingle, 2011), featuring
a semi-arid climate and hard rock aquifers (Sishodia et al, 2017). In 2014, Telangana was
granted independent statehood from Andhra Pradesh, after decades of political agitation and
marginalisation from unequal river water allocation, irrigation expansion and agricultural
expenditure in comparison to the coastal regions of Andhra Pradesh (Reddy et al, 2014a;
Prasad, 2015; Benbabaali, 2016).
In the 1990s, Telangana became the forefront of agricultural liberalisation in India, referred by
the Economist (Taylor, 2011: p489) as “the state that would reform India”. In partnership with
the World Bank, the Andhra Pradesh Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu instituted a plan in
1999 called “Vision 2020”, which aimed to transform the state into a service sector economy,
reorient agriculture to commercial biotechnology crops for exports and cut agricultural
subsidies (Bowles, 2003; Mooij, 2007). Adoption of cash crops such as cotton propelled
Telangana’s agricultural growth to 4.5% between 1985 and 2001, higher than the Indian
average during this timeframe (Vakulabharanam, 2005). Driven by the state’s 85% smallholder
population, cotton area increased from less than 13% of the cropped area in the state in the
1990s to almost 40% by 2018, becoming the third largest state in India for cotton (Kranthi and
Stone, 2020) (see Chapter 3).
Similarly, Telangana’s rainfed lands were watered in the Liberalised Green Revolution through
tubewell irrigation, increasing economic growth via irrigated agriculture. As late as 1988, only
25% of Telangana’s cultivated area was irrigated, less than 5% from tubewells (DES
Telangana, 2016). From a policy perspective, expanding tubewells in Telangana democratised
access in irrigation and agricultural technologies through the private sector to smallholders,
27
maximising economic growth (The Hans India, 2020). By 2018, tubewells became the biggest
irrigation source in Telangana, contributing to 57% of the total irrigated area at 1.2 million
hectares, of which 80% is owned by smallholder farmers (MoWR, 2017; DES Andhra Pradesh,
2006; DES Telangana, 2019a).
Importantly however, agricultural commercialisation created unforeseen effects for rural
livelihoods in Telangana. Telangana has the second highest indebtedness rate amongst
agricultural households in India at 89% in 2013, up from 80% in 2002, with household debts
increasing 7x in this period (Reddy, 2014). This is compared to an average of 57% for India
(Reddy et al, 2019) (see Chapter 3, 5 and 6). Moreover, debt to asset ratios in the state are 6 to
1 and cotton cultivation costs are amongst the highest of any state in India (DES India, 2018),
demonstrating the effects of Bt cotton adoption on debts for rural households in Telangana.
Unremunerative returns, climate change and rising debts from commercial crops has brought
many farmers in Telangana to join nationwide protests against new laws introduced by the
Indian government in 2020 to further deregulate agricultural markets for crops in India (Deccan
Chronicle, 2020). This is in addition to the state having a 25% unemployment rate amongst
youth, the 5th highest in India (Reddy, 2020b). Declining monsoons and groundwater tables in
the last few decades (CGWB Telangana, 2019) have also underlined the agroclimatic and
hydrogeological constraints of agricultural intensification. Telangana is one of the nine hotspot
states in India for highest groundwater depletion (Rajan et al, 2020). The choice of Telangana
as a case study for the thesis is therefore salient in understanding the intersectional political
economy dynamics of the Liberalised Green Revolution of debt, agroecological setting, market
intermediaries and governments and the subsequent long-term rural livelihood implications.
1.7 Thesis structure
Chapter 2 details the Liberalised Green Revolution theoretical framework and literature review.
It theorises the Liberalised Green Revolution as a distinct epoch of agricultural modernisation
relative to the Green Revolution. The chapter then explores the Liberalised Green Revolution
in the Indian context, exploring Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation as flagship technologies of
the era. In the final section of the literature review, I examine the Liberalised Green Revolution
in the context of the increasing role of non-farm livelihoods in rural settings. Tying the
literature together, the chapter identifies gaps and justifies the remit of the research questions
for the thesis.
28
Chapter 3 details the methodology for the thesis and explains the chosen mixed methods case
study ethnographic approach to the fieldwork. I provide background data for my fieldwork
village Kacharam, unveiling the socio-economic and socio-ecological characteristics of the
village. Next, I explain the process of data collection for the thesis through household surveys
and interviews. The chapter subsequently discusses how the data was analysed using thematic
coding and presented for the analysis chapters. This is followed by a discussion of the ethical
considerations, regarding consent, power, and representation. Finally, the chapter observes the
limitations of the fieldwork process and how I mitigated these.
Chapter 4 answers the question: “What are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in the
Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana?”. The chapter charts the antecedent conditions of
Bt cotton adoption in Kacharam and the push and pull factors for the transition. It then
examines Bt cotton adoption in the village through debt relations, household incomes and
farmer knowledge. This is entwined with the changing agroecological conditions for the Bt
cotton outcomes and policy context during the Liberalised Green Revolution. The chapter also
explores the intermediary relations between moneylenders, input dealers and farmers as an
explanation for long term Bt cotton outcomes.
Chapter 5 answers the question “How has tubewell irrigation changed the political economy of
agriculture in Telangana?”. The chapter starts with a discussion of policy and farmer
motivations for irrigated agriculture in Telangana and fieldwork village that led to the adoption
of tubewells in the Liberalised Green Revolution. The chapter proceeds to explain the
environmental and economic consequences of tubewell adoption at the village level and in
Telangana, supported by climate and hydrogeological data. The chapter then explores why it
has been adverse, explaining the intersection of cropping decisions, climate, tubewell
exploitation, public policy incentives and intermediary roles of drilling firms in encouraging
the expansion of tubewell overexploitation and well drilling.
Chapter 6 answers the question: “What are the implications of the Liberalised Green
Revolution for the future of agricultural livelihoods in Telangana?”. The importance of non-
farm incomes for households in the fieldwork village and in Telangana is shown to be both a
distress induced decision from Liberalised Green Revolution technologies that have influenced
intergenerational aspirations in educated rural youth to leave agriculture. Next, the chapter
delineates the inadequacy of non-farm livelihoods to make ends meet for rural households and
why this is so, linking both distress in agriculture and non-farm livelihoods to structural
29
problems in the Indian labour market. The chapter then looks at the strategies employed by
farmers to repay debts and meet their household expenditures considering the joblessness and
underemployment problems faced by both farmers and their educated children.
Chapter 7 summarises the findings from the thesis in Chapters 4 to 6. It discusses the results
from the fieldwork and connects the findings from the three chapters. The chapter not only
discusses the chapters in relation to each other, but also to the gaps and debates in the literature
it fills, contests, agrees, or improves on. Chapter 7 concludes with a discussion on the
limitations of the findings from the thesis and how they were mitigated.
Finally, Chapter 8 concludes the thesis by asking what the empirical findings from the thesis
mean for broader understandings of technology and agrarian change in the wider literature and
policy, detailing the implications of the thesis findings for further research.
30
Chapter 2 - Theoretical Framework and Literature Review
2.1 Introduction
Chapter 1 introduced the political economy of the Liberalised Green Revolution and outlined
the research questions, debates, and gaps in the literature for the rest of the thesis to address.
This chapter theoretically unpacks the political economy framework in more depth, before
applying it to the case study of India and the adoption of Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation. This
sets up the theoretical and empirical debates and gaps in more detail for the empirical chapters
4, 5 and 6 of the thesis to address.
This chapter examines the political economy processes within the Liberalised Green
Revolution. It nuances the agricultural commercialisation model, which argues that private
sector led agricultural technology adoption and market integration of smallholder farmers
increases yields, incomes and enables the economic transition towards non-farm livelihoods
(Zhou, 2010). Combining insights from agrarian political economy (McMichael, 2009; Jan and
Harriss-White, 2012; Aga, 2018; Sinha, 2020) and political ecology (Taylor, 2011, 2013b,
2020a; Luna, 2019; Ramprasad, 2019; Green, 2019, 2020), I demonstrate that agricultural
commercialisation in dryland smallholder settings does not always deliver long term yield and
income increases. In particular instances I demonstrate, it leads to rising indebtedness and a
distress induced transition from agriculture to non-farm livelihoods as a primary income.
The chapter emphasises that agricultural commercialisation does not exist merely in the
abstract but is embedded in its political economy context (Sultana, 2013). This consists of the
intersection of the agroecological setting (Ruben and Pender, 2004), credit/debt relations
(Ramprasad, 2019) and the role of private intermediaries and governments (Glover, 2007;
Kashwan et al, 2019; Sinha, 2020) in understanding the commercialisation process. I argue that
the Liberalised Green Revolution must be understood as the sum of these parts, a theoretical
novelty in the literature left underexplored. Furthermore, the role of market intermediaries as
lead actors in spreading agricultural commercialisation to smallholder settings has not been
explored in the literature thus far either, with some exceptions (Aga, 2018).
The chapter applies the Liberalised Green Revolution framework to the case study of India,
focusing on agricultural liberalisation since the 1990s and the widespread smallholder adoption
of Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation technologies. These are regarded as the two flagship private
sector agricultural technologies that have contributed to India becoming the biggest cotton
grower and groundwater irrigation user in the world, but for some in the literature has burdened
31
smallholders with detrimental long term economic and environmental consequences (Gutierrez
et al, 2020; Rajan et al, 2020). Finally, the chapter ends by linking the outcomes of agricultural
technology adoption in the Liberalised Green Revolution and the reliance on non-farm
livelihoods as their primary income, which are themselves often informal and insecure in tenure
(Harriss-White, 2012). Through the exploration of the theory and empirics of agricultural
commercialisation in India and other developing countries, the chapter identifies key gaps to
be addressed by the empirical chapters 4, 5 and 6 in this thesis. The empirical chapters focus
on the south Indian state of Telangana as a case study for the political economy of dryland
smallholder intensification where it rapidly transformed from a rainfed to smallholder
commercial farming state on the back of Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation (Pingle, 2011; Stone
and Flachs, 2018).
2.2 Theorising the Liberalised Green Revolution
This section theorises the political economy of the Liberalised Green Revolution. Since the
Green Revolution in the 1960s, the model for agricultural modernisation in developing
countries has been premised on the application of high yielding seeds, biochemical
intensification via fertilisers and pesticides, and irrigation (Murgai et al, 2001). The goal of
technological intensification is to achieve higher yields from the same land area, improving
productivity per acre, food security and profitability for smallholder farmers (Posani, 2009).
The Green Revolution however was largely delivered through public sector investments in
seeds, inputs, irrigation, and credit and occurred in favourable climatic and irrigated areas
amongst richer classes of farmers (Lerche, 2011).
Over the last three decades, increasing agricultural policy attention has been paid to
smallholder farmers in marginal growing environments, the final frontier to replicate the Green
Revolution in (Moseley, 2017). Marginal growing environments are defined here as arid and
semi-arid agroecological zones that have a low annual average rainfall and short growing
season at 60-120 days per year (Pender, 2007). These farmers are spread across 55 countries in
Asia, Latin America and Africa, where one billion farmers survive on less than 2ha land and
make under $2 per day from agriculture (Dar, 2011). Distinct from the original public sector
driven Green Revolution, policy and government discourse in recent decades has advocated
for the central role of the private sector to deliver agricultural commercialisation, under the
ideological and policy lever of economic liberalisation, what I call the Liberalised Green
Revolution.
32
Following a number of macroeconomic crises in the 1980s, numerous developing countries in
Africa, Asia and Latin America underwent structural adjustment policies from the IMF and
World Bank (Easterly, 2005). In exchange for economic bailouts, country governments agreed
to reduce public expenditure, privatise public assets, liberalise trade policy and stabilise prices
and inflation (Banerjee and Duflo, 2019). In agriculture, this involved the opening up of
agricultural commodity export markets, removal of public subsidies, incentivisation of cash
crop agriculture, deregulation of foreign direct investment in agricultural technologies and
food, reducing import tariffs and strengthening value chain integration (Ramachandran, 2011).
The basic tenets of these agrarian reforms came from economic theory that lower prices, higher
profits, and greater efficiency are driven by decentralised private market competition and an
undistorted price system (Boudreaux, 2014). The price system was key in determining which
crops to grow and sell on the international market and allocate resources to (Vakulabharanam,
2004). The agricultural sector it was assumed, would increase economic growth through market
integration and commercialisation of cropping patterns. To achieve this, liberalisation in
agriculture included creating greater incentives for the private sector at local, national, and
international levels in seeds, extension services, fertilisers, pesticides, and credit (Sahay, 2010).
This is reflected in the World Bank’s flagship annual report from 2008 (Byerlee et al, 2008:
p25), where it described the new private sector agricultural agenda for reducing poverty and
maximising economic growth:
“Objective 1. Improve access to markets and establish efficient value chains
Objective 2. Enhance smallholder competitiveness and facilitate market entry
Objective 3. Improve livelihoods in subsistence farming
Objective 4. Increase employment in agriculture and the rural nonfarm economy;
enhance skills”
The assemblage of technologies and practises could lead to the growth of the agricultural
economy and towards structural transformation, following agricultural modernisation theory
(Schultz, 1964; Mellor 1976). Akram-Lodhi (1998: p136) defines structural transformation as
the:
33
“changes in the pattern of production, with a shift from an economy dominated by
agriculture to an economy driven by industrial manufacturing; produced inputs, with a
shift towards capital intensive production techniques and technologies in both the
agricultural and the non-agricultural sectors; employment, with a shift from agricultural
to non-agricultural occupations; and demand, with the formation of a home market
capable of sustaining accumulation”
Agricultural modernisation theorists have pointed to a number of causal processes via
agricultural development towards to wider structural transformation. Carlson (2018) lists the
various roles of agricultural modernisation as providing surplus from commodity exports for
financing imports of goods and services, food supplies for urban centres, investments into other
sectors, and greater domestic market via rising agricultural productivity. Mellor (1976)
explains that increased agricultural production would lead to greater incomes for farmers,
thereby increasing demand for non-agricultural goods and services. This would generate
greater employment in non-agricultural sectors both in rural and urban areas, a spill over effect
caused by rising household consumption expenditure by farmers benefiting from the
agricultural commercialisation and eventual exit from agriculture and into non-farm work
(Chang, 2009). Figure 2 below shows the stylised model of agricultural modernisation.
Figure 2 - Private Agricultural Modernisation Framework
Source: Zhou (2010: p4)
34
As shown by the diagram, the low input/low output subsistence farming system is transformed
into a high input (capital, technology, fertilisers, energy, water) and high output system of
commodity agriculture (Akram-Lodhi, 2008). Via agricultural modernisation, climate
extremes, pests, disease, and low soil fertility could be overcome by technological innovation
in new chemical fertilisers and insect/drought resistant seeds (Van Der Ploeg, 2014).
Agricultural modernisation by its proponents was a scientific formula that was replicable,
reliable, and produced maximum yield and output of high value agricultural commodities
(Dutta, 2012). The end point for this is structural transformation, which tackles how agriculture
can be restructured to generate economic growth for this transition.
Exactly how this causal process works, the role of smallholder farmers within agriculture in
economic development under capitalism and implications for developing countries has
garnered much empirical and theoretical debate in the agrarian political economy literature.
Key Marxist thinkers such as Lenin and Kautsky (Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010b) in the 19th
century envisaged the integration of smallholder farmers into capitalism as the transition from
peasant farming for subsistence into wage labourers. They predicted that farmers would be
dispossessed of their land and sold to larger landholder operations, and they would seek full
time work in daily wage labour activities in cities (Kumar, 2017). Agricultural development
had the potential to differentiate the erstwhile subsistence peasant into a first group that adapted
and competed within agricultural commodity markets for capital accumulation (Carlson, 2018).
The second group however could not survive in market competition and continued with
subsistence farming, but rising cost of living forced them to sell their land and labour to large
farm operations and work in cities. Kautsky (Ghosh and Meer, 2020), coining the term
“agrarian question”, observed that as capital entered agriculture and as urbanisation and
industrialisation proceeded it would lead to the structural transformation of an economy.
A key theorist developing this debate under the context of neoliberalism since the 1980s has
been Byres (1991; 1995; 2009; 2016) with his work on the agrarian question, analysing the
transition of historical nation states in Europe, Japan, and the USA from primarily agrarian
societies to industrialisation. This entails the dynamics behind how and why capitalism
progresses in agriculture historically in generating economic growth for industrialisation and
the differentiated trajectories it has taken in contemporary developing countries (ibid).
Agriculture is a crucial part of the economy as it accelerates economic development and
increases the domestic food supply for urban areas, as well as these surpluses used for
35
investments into goods and services elsewhere in the economy. For Byres (1995), agriculture
in developing countries today has largely failed to generate the surpluses needed to stimulate
an agrarian transition, and unlike in previous generations such as the Green Revolution,
governments under neoliberalism have not facilitated agricultural development. Traditional
linkages between agriculture and industry have frayed in the political economy of developing
countries today, throwing into focus the implications for smallholder farmer livelihoods as a
result. Byres’ (1991) problematic therefore is why capitalism’s entry into agriculture has not
accelerated this process of dispossession into wage labourers at the same time as agriculture
not producing surpluses for industrialisation.
Nuancing and adding to this debate on agrarian transitions under capitalism, Bernstein (1996;
2004; 2006; 2010) has emphasised a focus away from the linkages between agriculture and
industrialisation, pointing to the dominance of globalisation in determining economic growth
in agriculture. In recent decades under neoliberalism he argues, the relaxation of trade barriers
in agricultural policy in developing countries through the lobbying of the IMF, World Bank
and WTO has incentivised foreign direct investments by the private sector into agriculture. In
this context, Bernstein (2006) explains that globalisation has upended the agrarian question of
capital, namely how agriculture generates the economic growth for industrialisation. Key parts
of globalisation include the increasing organisation of agriculture within the remit of global
value chains, incentivised by harmonisation of trade barriers and liberalisation of agribusiness
in inputs to enter and invest into developing countries to tie farmers into market relations for
both inputs and outputs (Bernstein, 2010). The effects on smallholder livelihoods from
globalisation is in fact greater insecurity and uncertainty due to price fluctuations for
commodity crops and rising cost of inputs backed by credit.
Global capital flows facilitate capital accumulation in agriculture through the import of new
private sector technologies, helping power agricultural growth without domestic investment,
and allowing the import of foods, goods and services (Ghosh and Meer, 2020). This has been
the model espoused by the World Bank within the Liberalised Green Revolution (Byerlee et
al, 2008). Similarly, industrialisation in developing countries has been proceeding without
agricultural development, shifting the focus of the agrarian question from capital to labour
(Akram-Lodhi and Kay, 2010b). A more pressing issue therefore for Bernstein (2004) for
agriculture in the 21st century is the agrarian question of labour, the fates of smallholder farmers
in agriculture in a sector not required for economic development. What has been happening is
the subsumption of agrarian classes into a spectrum of “classes of labour”, all occurring within
36
commercial agriculture and market relations. The classes of labour created within agriculture
mean that farmers rely more on wage labour than from agriculture, which are because of the
differentiated returns from capitalism in agriculture in the 21st century, where for Bernstein
(2006: p455), farmers:
“especially in the "South," pursue their reproduction, that is, through insecure and
oppressive - and in many places increasingly scarce - wage employment, often
combined with a range of likewise precarious small-scale farming and insecure
"informal sector" ("survival") activity, subject to its own forms of differentiation and
oppression along intersecting lines of class, gender, generation, caste, and ethnicity. In
short, most have to pursue their means of livelihood/reproduction across different sites
of the social division of labour: urban and rural, agricultural and non-agricultural, wage
employment and self-employment.”
In contemporary agrarian development, many smallholder farmers continue to work in
agriculture and non-farm work, not fully transformed into wage labourers despite agricultural
commercialisation under neoliberal globalisation (Kumar, 2017). At the same time, nor has the
linkage between agricultural growth and industrialisation occurred from government policy but
more through private capital entering developing countries. This has according to Bernstein
(2006) circumvented smallholder farmers in favour of larger scale farming by agribusiness,
leaving the former to engage in a fragmented set of rural and non-rural livelihoods to survive
(Levien et al, 2018). Smallholders within capitalist agriculture often persist as “petty
commodity producers”, selling their labour and entering market relations in agriculture but
without adequate income from either. They require a patchwork of livelihood income sources,
of which agriculture is just one.
Differentiation within agriculture in under neoliberalism has been delineated by Akram-Lodhi
and Kay (2010b) into two forms of production systems. First, they explain, are tightly
integrated export commodity farmers, producing high value commodity crops for cash for
foreign markets. This group for example has benefited from liberalisation, as agricultural
policy making has incentivised greater adoption of export commodity crops. The second are
petty commodity producers, smallholder farmers that are integrated into commodity cropping
patterns but do not necessarily gain from market relations like the first group. Instead, the
process of agricultural commercialisation creates differentiation as smallholder farmers.
37
According to Lerche (2013), differentiation within agriculture has occurred between politically
connected landlord classes that have benefited from agricultural commercialisation through the
private sector, versus smallholder farmers that have seen minimal improvements in their rural
livelihoods (Sinha, 2020). Although many smallholder farmers ostensibly have access to land,
private property, markets and technologies, conditions of work both within agriculture and
outside of it under agricultural capitalism has only intensified the struggle for a decent
livelihood in rural areas in developing countries.
A key reason for the lack progression of agricultural development in poor countries has been
the growing population of smallholder farmers and shrinking land sizes. Without land reforms,
smallholder farmers facing climate change, rising cost of living and high input costs in
agriculture persist in capitalist agriculture without remunerative returns, forced to seek non-
farm livelihoods to supplement their incomes (Carlson, 2018).
In this thesis, I add to and develop a causal process of why smallholder commercialisation has
not proceeded successfully in certain dryland areas in India. In doing so, I critique the
normative assumptions of technology adoption driving increases in yields and incomes for
farmers in all contexts. Utilising insights from political ecology and agrarian political economy,
I argue that agricultural commercialisation must be embedded in the political economy context
of the intersection between the resource intensification in marginal agroecological settings
(Lopez, 2002), the credit/debt relations farmers enter in to finance technologies (Green, 2020)
and the role of market intermediaries and governments in promoting market integration and
technology adoption to smallholder farmers (Glover, 2007; 2010a). These have not been
studied together theoretically in the literature in explaining agrarian change, so I theorise them
within a Liberalised Green Revolution frame. In this, I link agricultural commercialisation with
long term increases in indebtedness, stagnation/decline in yields and incomes due to the
incumbent agroecological setting being unviable for long term intensification. This pushes
farmers towards non-farm livelihoods out of distress from commercialisation, rather than
agricultural commercialisation driving economic growth, as agricultural modernisation
theorists predicted (De Janvry, 2010). This is shown in Figure 3 below.
38
Figure 3 - Liberalised Green Revolution Framework
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2021)
Additionally, I show that under economic liberalisation markets coexist in pockets alongside
government intervention (Jakobsen, 2018), with each set of actors maximising their own
economic outcomes but potentially making smallholder farmers worse off in two directions.
Agricultural commercialisation was promoted by market intermediaries (Aga, 2018; 2019) in
inherently risky agroecological environments constrained by poor fertility soils, scarce water
resources for irrigation and unreliable monsoons (Taylor, 2013b). Through the application of
resource and capital-intensive agricultural technologies, it only increased incomes in the short
term, in exchange for longer term economic and environmental risk of unsustainable yields for
smallholder farmer adopters.
In the Liberalised Green Revolution, the lead role of market intermediaries in input, credit and
seed provision dispersed power in a decentralised manner to intermediaries, mediated by social
structures of class, caste, and gender (Guerin et al, 2012; Taylor, 2011; Pattenden, 2018). I
show that despite recent development policy efforts to expand formal credit access to the urban
and rural poor through the “financial inclusion” agenda (Demirguc-Kunt and Klapper, 2012),
informal credit remains the dominant source of credit for smallholder farmers in developing
countries (Dermirguc-Kunt et al, 2018). In marginal agroecological settings, intensification did
not often sustain yield and income improvements in the long term for smallholder farmers
39
(Dhanagare, 2016). These operations were financed by high interest informal credit, so
unremunerative yields and indebtedness locked farmers into debt relations with creditors and
forced them to earn non-farm livelihoods to repay debt obligations (Natarajan et al, 2019).
Furthermore, cultural shifts with economic liberalisation such as the desire for material
prosperity and household consumption also increased the economic obligations for rural
households (Luna, 2019; Jakobsen, 2019). Commodity crops were grown to meet these costs,
but in unsuitable climatic settings, farmers often amplifying environmental risk and
indebtedness again by cultivating these crops (Taylor, 2013b). This maximised profitability for
private intermediaries through sustained input investments and to richer classes who had better
risk bearing capacities to absorb unproductive harvests, plus leveraging favourable credit terms
relative to smallholder farmers (Sinha, 2020). Where the government existed, they facilitated
capital accumulation in markets and intervened in politically expedient ways such as by
expanding subsidies to incentivise unsustainable commodity cropping and retain voting bases
in electoral competition (Sanyal, 2008).
The following sections break down the Liberalised Green Revolution political economy
framework in more detail, discussing agroecological settings and technology adoption,
credit/debt relations and market intermediaries and governments in the process of adverse
agricultural commercialisation.
2.2.1 Environmental setting
A crucial aspect of the Green Revolution in developing countries was the selection of specific
fertile, climatic, and irrigated/stable rainfall agroecological growing environments for
implementing agricultural modernisation (Chambers, 1984; Harris-White and Janakarajan,
1997). Therefore, the material biophysical and geographical setting in which agriculture takes
place mediates beneficial agricultural technology adoption (Myers et al, 2020). Therein, we
begin to see why the Liberalised Green Revolution faces an acute set of agroecological
constraints.
Smallholder farmers in marginal growing areas must contend with not only a low asset and
resource base from their cultivation area but also the biophysical characteristics that bring
added environmental and economic risk in practising commercial farming (Rao, 2008).
Farmers in marginal environments can only rely on a maximum of 120 days a year for a
growing season, that too with variability in monsoon rainfall (Pender, 2007). Within this short
growing season, farmers must negotiate poor productivity soils that can only sustain cultivation
40
and nutrient uptake for short periods before being prone to long term soil degradation (Lopez,
2002). In addition, semi-arid and arid zones face low and unreliable annual rainfall of 500-
800mm, often concentrated in a short, intense monsoon period of three to four months (Kumar
et al, 2019). Out of this rainfall however, only 30-40% is utilised by crops, with the rest lost to
the atmosphere in evapotranspiration and in the form of runoff overland (Kuchimanchi et al,
2019).
Agriculture in arid and semi-arid areas is regulated by the timing and quantity of rainfall in a
very short window, where any deviation outside of this can render a failed harvest (Taylor and
Bhasme, 2020). Planting too early before the monsoon arrives or leaving the sowing and
weeding of land too late into the growing season present farmers with an extremely small
margin of error in which to plant and harvest a cash crop (Gine et al, 2008). As Bharucha (2019)
describes, in marginal growing environments the determinant of a good season can be down to
missing rain in one part of the village by a few days. In instances where farmers have access to
irrigation, it is often limited to groundwater supplies as smallholder farmers in marginal regions
are often left outside of government canal irrigation projects (Tripp, 2001; Ruben and Pender,
2004). The overall groundwater supplies over time however are regulated by the type and
amount of monsoon recharge. Too little rain can produce insufficient aquifer recharge. On the
other hand, too much rainfall is lost to evapotranspiration and runoff (Lall et al, 2020). This
makes water unable to percolate to aquifers through low storage and infiltration capacity soils
such as laterite red soils, found in large parts of Africa, India, South East Asia and South
America (Mohamed and Paleologos, 2018).
These exogenous risks of low and unpredictable precipitation, drought and poor productivity
soils are only set to be worsened by climate change in the future. Globally, the increased
frequency of droughts and hotter temperatures in semi-arid regions are predicted to reduce
average crop yields by up to 50% (Sharma et al, 2014), destabilising and creating further
uncertainty for farmers to grow crops. As Li et al (2020) explain, increase in temperatures in
marginal agricultural zones globally will exacerbate the severity and frequency of drought
events and extreme rainfall events, with dryland regions set to increase in absolute area by an
average of 17% between now and 2100 (ibid).
Concomitantly, agricultural intensification in marginal settings can in particular scenarios
further undermine the fragile resource base farmers possess. For instance, Sishodia et al (2018)
link the expansion of increased groundwater pumping and irrigation area in India with the long
41
term well drying in semi-arid areas, so in this instance technology adoption causes groundwater
depletion through pressures on low yielding hard rock aquifers. Furthermore, the biophysical
characteristics of soils in marginal environments mean they are unable to retain nutrients, are
prone to erosion and are low in productivity, limiting the extent to which they can be
intensified. As Lopez (2002: p1216) explains:
“This [soil] fragility imposes restrictions on the pace of intensification…Tropical soils
are not only fragile but they are also subject to threshold effects. That is, if degradation
reaches a certain point, the process accelerates and becomes irreversible…agricultural
intensification without protective investments can induce short term gains at the cost of
rapid degradation of soils, which may lead to great income losses in the long run.”
Contrary to agricultural liberalisation’s proponents, the linear increases in yields and incomes
from agricultural intensification are unlikely to be replicated in marginal areas given the
inherent environmental risks from climate, soils, and water stress that farmers face (Singh et
al, 2018). Not only this, but continued agricultural intensification in these areas can even
permanently degrade the natural resource base of soils and groundwater, leading to long term
losses in income and yields (Poulton et al, 2006; Sharma et al, 2018). For political ecologists,
this shows how the one size fits all approach of transforming agriculture for economic
development cannot be extricated from how the biophysical and geographic setting co-
produces and influences agricultural technology adoption (Schnurr, 2012). Agricultural
technologies cannot be transplanted into nor can they overcome agroecological contexts with
the same expectation of outputs and yields in favourable settings (Kumar et al, 2019).
Nonetheless, the continued pursuit of the intensification model of the Green Revolution persists
in contemporary development discourse as the normative goal for developing countries for the
structural transformation from agrarian society to industrialisation (Moseley, 2017).
2.2.2 Credit/debt relations in the Liberalised Green Revolution
The Liberalised Green Revolution since the 1980s has also brought new opportunities for
smallholder farmers to finance their agricultural investments via credit (Ramprasad, 2019).
Credit is essential for investing in inputs, labour, and irrigation, due to the low asset base and
cash savings held by smallholder farmers in marginal areas (Dorward et al, 2004). In the
Liberalised Green Revolution, seeds, inputs, pesticides, mechanisation, irrigation, and
chemical fertiliser have become externalised to input dealers and market actors, as well as for
commodity markets for sale and export (Bernstein, 2014).
42
Commodity crops such as soybeans, cotton and tobacco fetch high market prices but also
require high capital investments. Cash crops often require intensive fertiliser and pesticide
applications, requiring the land to remain fallow after the growing season and allowing only
one crop per monsoon season to be grown (Dowd-Uribe and Schnurr, 2016). This leaves the
entire economic return for cash crops for food and household consumption to their successful
harvest in the market. In all this, credit is the crucial lubricant for the commercial agricultural
system and sustaining agricultural investments (Jan and Harriss-White, 2012).
To facilitate the integration of rural livelihoods into markets, policy discourse in the economics
literature has centred around increasing availability and access to formal credit in developing
countries (Demirguc-Kunt et al, 2018). Credit has been channelled through microfinance,
mobile payments, and formal bank account access in developing countries under the “financial
inclusion” agenda (Taylor, 2011; 2012). Between 2011 and 2017, 1.2 billion people in 25
developing countries gained access to one of the three credit sources as part of formal credit
expansion, increasing the share of adults with formal credit access by 9% in this period
(Demirguc-Kunt et al, 2018).
For its proponents, the “financial inclusion” agenda opens credit access to the rural poor with
limited assets and collateral, giving them the ability to invest in their livelihoods through
individual entrepreneurship (Green, 2019). However, Reddy et al (2019) find in the Indian case
that the expansion of formal credit has done little to change the demand for informal credit in
smallholder settings. They explain that that although 79% of people in rural India had access
to a bank account in 2017, only 17% borrowed from banks to sustain their household (ibid).
Other scholars explained that formal credit often accrued to large landowners due to their caste
and class networks with bank officers. Many of these farmers were also moneylenders, who
often used bank loans to reinvest in their informal lending operations back to smallholder
farmers (Guerin et al, 2012; Surendra, 2020).
The Liberalised Green Revolution has brought credit relations to the forefront of rural life.
Theoretically, agricultural commercialisation promises profitability and higher yields from
agricultural technology adoption, enabling farmers to repay creditors and make a profit on their
investment (Harriss-White, 2020). Yet as shown above, in marginal settings, the yield return
on investment is uncertain relative to more favourable environments, often undermining the
fragile resource base farmers must survive on. This has the effect of thereby increasing the
43
environmental and economic risk from unrealised returns from agricultural commercialisation
(Watts, 1983).
In one instant, credit can transform into indebtedness due to intensification in unsuitable
drought prone areas, erratic rainfall, and climatic change.
As Taylor (2013b: p323) explains:
“On the one hand, taking on loans to rent extra land, purchase inputs, drill wells or settle
existing consumption expenses appears as an immediate and necessary escape from the
constraints placed on marginal households. However, debt simultaneously functions as
a core form of dependency, locking households into relations that provide a source of
ongoing surplus extraction for the holders of capital. These relationships create the
grounds for escalating debt traps, where households take multiple, overlapping loans
without any realistic expectation of being able to pay them off in the medium term.”
In these marginal environments, the more farmers invest in intensification, the greater chance
they fall into deeper debt relations, combining ecological and economic distress cycles to
worsen farmer livelihoods in the long run (Natarajan et al, 2019). In switching to cash crops,
farmers rely on the high market price to repay the debts on investments in seeds, fertiliser,
pesticides, mechanisation, irrigation, and labour (Jakimow, 2014). Yet, commodity crops are
prone to market price fluctuations as well environmental risks (Mosse, 2007), so there is also
a chance it can drive smallholder farmers into further debt.
Hedging their investments and consumption needs on cash crops in volatile commodity
markets in marginal settings may also create dependency on commodification. Political
ecologists such as Watts (1983: p255) call this a “reproduction squeeze”, explaining how the
mutually reinforcing processes of environmental decline and rising indebtedness compel
farmers to deepen their intensification to keep afloat and earn cash for the household,
integrating them further into markets out of desperation for cash and thus repeating the cycle.
The economic and environmental risks from commercial agriculture also bring social
consequences for rural households, having to contend with the social individuation of
indebtedness. As Vasquez (2020) explains from studying Colombian smallholder coffee
commercialisation, the failure to repay debts leads to a loss of face and honour at the village
setting when creditors enforce pressures publicly for farmers to repay (Vasavi, 2009; 2014). In
India for example, Nilotpal (2011) reports how smallholder farmers beholden to debts face
44
public humiliation, violence, threats for not repaying, disciplining the individual farmer in front
of the whole village (ibid).
Finally, under economic liberalisation in developing countries, credit and cash expenditure in
rural areas have become a fundamental part of everyday life not only in agriculture but for
market relations for everyday household consumption and goods and services (Harriss-White,
2013). Demand for material goods and services such as private school education, TVs,
motorbikes, cell phones, fridges and more expensive weddings in rural areas all feature in rural
household credit and cash needs (Deb et al, 2014; Kingdon, 2020). As Jakobsen and Nielsen
(2019) explain, increasing material consumption in rural households in this era has been driven
by the desire for social mobility for smallholder farmers in emulating higher classes in rural
and urban areas and as a cultural symbol of material success (Bennike et al, 2020). This has
been mediated by the cultural influence and spread of mass media and communications through
TV, internet and radio, alongside greater urban and rural linkages via migrant labour that have
exposed rural households to the cultural osmosis of material consumption (Jodhka, 2014).
The rising economic obligations in debt repayment in social and economic life only further
increase the reliance on quick incomes via commodity cash crop agriculture in marginal
settings to cover household consumption demands (Luna, 2019). This underlines the
intersection of credit/debt relations, agrarian and environmental change for understanding why
the agricultural commercialisation model may not replicate in marginal smallholder settings.
The final two components of the political economy framework presented in this section are the
wider political and institutional factors that farmers interact with in the process of agricultural
intensification. Relative to the previous Green Revolution model of the government leading
investments in seeds, inputs, irrigation, credit and extension services, economic liberalisation
remade the purpose of the state (Sanyal, 2008). Under economic liberalisation, the technology-
led agricultural transformation of smallholder farmers occurred through the lead role of the
private sector and market intermediaries, seen by proponents as key actors in integrating
farmers into value chains and commodity markets (Bergius and Busteth, 2019).
45
2.2.3 Market intermediaries and governments under agricultural liberalisation
Market intermediaries in agriculture refer to a heterogenous set of actors that operate in both
input and output markets in agriculture, spanning different scales of operations and power
(Lerche, 2015). These include input dealers, irrigation firms, moneylenders, market traders of
agricultural produce and agribusiness. In agrarian political economy literature, market actors
are at times problematically located at the national or global level in the form of hegemonic
corporate agribusinesses forcing smallholder farmers into agricultural commercialisation as
part of a corporate global agenda (McMichael, 2009). Aga (2018) and Sinha (2020) on the
other hand, position intermediaries as locally situated and socially differentiated classes,
ethnicities and castes. They exist frequently as petty commodity producers who operate as
single person small-scale self-employed enterprises in small towns at the rural peripheries,
positioned within an “awkward” class in capitalist development (Harriss-White, 2018).
I argue that this decentralised geographic scale is where the process of market integration has
primarily operated in the Liberalised Green Revolution. In the previous section, I explained
how credit and debt relations were key in understanding the intersection of how debt shapes
commodity cropping patterns in marginal areas. The mechanism through which credit/debt
relations, agricultural intensification and environment is reinforced at the local level is through
intermediaries in interlocked factor markets. This is explained by Jaleta et al (2009: p16) as:
“In some cases, smallholders may not be able to obtain purchased farm inputs like
seeds, fertilizer and other chemicals due to shortage of liquidity or higher transaction
costs associated with these input markets. Moreover, they may not be able to have
access to output markets due to similar or other problems. Interlocked transaction is an
institutional arrangement meant to reduce transaction costs through tying agricultural
credit and input supply to the delivery of product at harvest..”
In the economics literature, interlocked factor markets are an ideal mechanism for smallholder
integration into commodity agriculture (Swain, 2000). According to this view, credit advanced
from input dealers allows farmers to finance their agricultural technology investments without
cash, and the intermediary also provides an output market at a guaranteed price in advance
from the farmer, reducing transportation costs and barriers to entry into output markets (Shami,
2012; Pal, 2015; Khanna and Majumdar, 2020). In summary, interlocked relations are seen by
advocates as mutually beneficial arrangements between intermediaries and farmers to
maximise economic outcomes (Jan and Harris-White, 2012).
46
Critiquing these assumptions, political ecology and agrarian political economy scholars
contend that interlocking factor markets are disciplining devices trapping farmers into cyclical
debt relations (Gerber, 2013). They argue that interlocking factor markets exacerbate
environmental risks in marginal environments through a “reproductive squeeze” the more they
intensify (Harriss-White, 2020). Farmers typically must pay interest repayments of 36-60% per
year on top of the principal loan for investments. Drought prone, low fertility soils or extreme
rainfall events may diminish yields or even lead to failed harvests, which means the farmer has
nothing to sell to the intermediary at the end of the season (Taylor, 2013b).
With limited other cash earning opportunities to repay their investments, farmers are tied into
repaying the cumulative loan amount in the next season. To meet the household financial
obligations, farmers often reinvest in the same cash crop or sell assets to stay on top of their
debt repayments (Gray and Dowd-Uribe, 2013). This keeps them indebted to intermediaries
until their debt is repaid, and can mutually exacerbate environmental degradation and distress
selling of assets such as land or jewellery to repay debt (ibid). Social differentiation by class
also means that larger farmers often can negotiate prices more favourably with traders, as well
as having access to lower interest credit from formal sources in comparison to informal credit
for smallholders (Ramprasad, 2019; Sinha, 2020).
Finally, the multiple interconnected roles played by the private market intermediaries under
economic liberalisation enables technology adoption in smallholder settings. Under a
retrenched public sector, private intermediaries promote agricultural technologies, supply
inputs, disburse credit, purchase harvests, and provide extension services, being involved at
every stage of the input and output market (Ramamurthy, 2011). Each role the intermediary
plays has the end goal of profit maximisation and maintaining revenue streams from a customer
base of farmers. In Ethiopia for example, Asfaw et al (2012) show how private seed firms had
little motivation to promote local crop varieties that farmers could save seeds for future harvests
and use local inputs within the farm. The interests of private intermediaries are to maximise
sales of inputs, and orient farmers to commodity crops to meet their profit goals (Glover, 2007).
Taking advantage of their monopoly position, intermediaries often market a new seed variety,
pesticide, or fertiliser even if it was unrelated to solving the farmer’s needs (Stone and Flachs,
2018). The dearth of public sector extension services gives farmers few options but to follow
intermediary advice (Aga, 2019). As promoters of agricultural technology adoption and
providers of credit, inputs and extension, intermediaries are frequently the drivers of
47
agricultural commercialisation of smallholders in marginal environments. In this scenario, the
benefits of technology adoption maximisation accrues to intermediaries more than for
smallholder farmers, who face an intersection of debt relations and environmental risk over the
long term by practising commodity agriculture (Bownas, 2016).
The final part in the political economy framework are governments. In the early phase of
economic liberalisation in the 1980s, policy reforms advocated for the rollback of the state to
allow markets to operate (Easterly, 2005). In agriculture, this included the privatisation and
decentralisation of power away from central governments and to market intermediaries and
corporations (Bernstein, 2014; Fairbarn et al, 2014). Evidence from developing countries
however suggests that government institutions are always involved in the politics of market
reform. Liberalisation exists within interstitial spaces of capital accumulation amidst state
intervention (Kashwan et al, 2019). In the Liberalised Green Revolution, market reform had
proceeded in a complex and uneven manner whereby political and agribusiness elites, as well
as market intermediaries used class, caste, and ethnic coalitions to benefit from agricultural
commercialisation (Sinha, 2020). The outcomes for smallholder farmers on the other hand, is
less of an intentional goal for governments.
As Shah and Harris-White (2011: p17) describe:
“The state has an incoherent project, encouraging small-scale livelihoods, destroying
them, protecting them, ignoring them, or allowing them to survive as an unintended
consequence of other intentions altogether.”
Despite the long term economic and environmental implications from commercial agriculture
for smallholders in marginal settings, economic liberalisation in agriculture has now become
an accepted norm in policy agendas at government levels to integrate farmers deeper into
markets (Levien et al, 2018).
Importantly however, governments simultaneously have intervened with welfare policy
promises for political aims. Vasavi (2019) for the Indian case demonstrates how the state and
central government levels in recent years have pursued an expansive public spending regime
in welfare policies such as cash transfers, loan waivers, minimum support prices and fertiliser
subsidies for farmer constituents. These amount to what Sanyal (2008) calls “welfare
governmentality”, the promotion of welfare to stem agrarian crisis and revolt from smallholder
farmers, whilst maintaining the primacy of marketisation in agriculture as a goal of economic
development. This also obviates any meaningful political reform such as land reforms (Patel,
48
2013). Agricultural liberalisation therefore is a contradictory mix of governments facilitating
market integration and welfare governmentality instead of the linear replacement of
governments with markets as was initially expected by policymaker proponents (Dhanagare,
2016).
Promoting agricultural commercialisation to resource poor areas of developing countries
imposes a technological fix to agriculture, expecting a linear increase in yields and incomes for
adopting smallholders (Bergius and Busteth, 2019). Focusing on market reforms however
missed out whether areas were agroecologically viable for growing commodity crops (Timmer,
2002). Within delimited contexts described earlier, agricultural commercialisation has
produced rising indebtedness, cultivation costs and unremunerative returns from technology
adoption in developing countries. Farming within an economic liberalisation context has in
many instances ceased to be a primary income for households, instead having to rely on non-
farm incomes for survival. In the literature, this process has been referred to as
deagrarianisation, defined by Hebinck (2018: p3-4) as:
“A process producing social, material, and biophysical conditions that are not
conducive to the reproduction of agrarian livelihoods…agriculture increasingly
provides insufficient income and employment opportunities, pushing people to work
off farm.”
Due to the declining returns from agriculture, Hu and Rahman (2014) explain how agriculture
is now one of many incomes for rural households in contemporary capitalism. Globally, a
survey of 54 developing countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America (Haggblade et al, 2010)
found non-farm earnings make up 35-50% of rural household incomes. In the literature
however, the focus on deagrarianisation is in relation to the unremunerative returns from
subsistence agriculture (Poulton et al, 2006) and the importance of non-farm livelihoods for
risk diversification and smoothing household cash flows.
This thesis agrees that non-farm incomes are an increasingly important in marginal smallholder
settings but locates the causal mechanism to agricultural intensification pushing smallholder
farmers to rely on non-farm livelihoods out of distress (Harriss-White, 2020). Migration out of
agriculture to non-farm livelihoods is not a function of rising productivity and income from
technology adoption as agricultural commercialisation theorists espouse, or by subsistence
farmers being squeezed out of agriculture. In the Liberalised Green Revolution frame I propose,
it is instead driven by unremunerative returns from agricultural intensification in marginal
49
settings. In the case of Cambodia for example, Natarajan et al (2019) find that climate change
and the expansion of formal microcredit access has driven cycles of debt bondage and migrant
labour by farmers to repay failed agricultural investments.
By proponents such as the World Bank, formal, salaried non-farm livelihoods were to be the
result of agricultural intensification via increasing yields and incomes. Instead, I argue that in
the Liberalised Green Revolution what can happen is what Singh and Bhogal (2016: p285)
refer to as “distress induced transformation”, defined as:
“crisis driven factors such as falling productivity, increasing costs and decreasing
returns, unemployment and underemployment and indebtedness. These “push factors”
force the agriculture workforce towards non-farm activities…”
Market driven intensification in agriculture can increase cultivation costs without relative
economic returns, leaving farmers to engage in non-farm incomes to meet obligations.
Empirical evidence of agricultural liberalisation in developing countries also refutes the idea
that market integration in smallholder settings improved long term economic outcomes. In a
survey of 20 developing countries in Africa, South Asia and Latin America that underwent
liberalisation by the IMF and World Bank, Easterly (2005) showed that none between 1980-
1999 had improved their rural poverty rates. This was no more evident than in the World
Bank’s own World Development Report (Byerlee et al, 2008: p138) where they reflected on
agricultural liberalisation:
“Structural adjustment in the 1980s dismantled the elaborate system of public agencies
that provided farmers with access to land, credit, insurance, inputs, and cooperative
organization. The expectation was that removing the state would free the market for
private actors to take over these functions . . . Too often, that didn’t happen. In some
places, the state’s withdrawal was tentative at best, limiting private entry. Elsewhere,
the private sector emerged only slowly and partially – mainly serving commercial
farmers but leaving smallholders exposed to extensive market failures, high transaction
costs and risks, and service gaps. Incomplete markets and institutional gaps impose
huge costs in forgone growth and welfare losses for smallholders, threatening their
competitiveness and, in many cases, their survival.”
For advocates of agricultural liberalisation, the lesson to be learnt from this was that farmers
did not integrate into markets enough in agriculture, rather than the failures of it (Dorward et
al, 2004). This shows how economic liberalisation continues as the normative paradigm in
50
developing countries, navigating its way through policy discourses at the international,
national, and local levels (Aalbers, 2013; Kashwan et al, 2019). Two additional components to
the model of agricultural commercialisation in the last decade have been to bring biotechnology
to smallholder agriculture and to integrate smallholder farmers into corporate value chains via
contract farming as a solution for food security and agricultural growth.
As Moseley et al (2015) observe, biotechnology and corporate value chains have formed the
foundation of an “African Green Revolution” in the last decade, bringing together private
sector agribusiness, philanthropic organisations, and international financial institutions in
support of the initiative (Bergius and Busteth, 2019). The emphasis has been to drive adoption
of GM crops with pest and drought resistance qualities, predicted to improve yields, reduce
pesticide costs, and increase profitability while meeting food security goals (Schnurr, 2015).
Since 1996, GM crops such as cotton, soyabeans, maize and canola have been adopted in 24
developing countries globally by 17 million farmers, over an area of 160 million acres (ISAAA,
2019). Political ecology analyses in South Africa and Burkina Faso however have already
shown that in less than two decades since their introduction, smallholder farmers in semi-arid
areas abandoned Bt cotton (Schnurr, 2012; Dowd-Uribe and Schnurr, 2016). High input costs,
rainfall variability, credit expenses, volatile commodity prices and low quality of the cotton
unsuitable for garment export exhausted GM technologies. Nonetheless, Bt cotton adoption
has spread to six countries in Africa, with Mozambique and Kenya at advanced stages of
approving new drought tolerant GM maize and cassava crops (ISAAA, 2019).
Moseley (2017) summarises that biotechnology and value chains are but new components to
the existing agricultural liberalisation model since the 1980s, continuing to emphasise the
market integration of smallholders and adoption of high yielding seed varieties for maximising
production and profitability. These have also been envisioned as the solution for improving
smallholder farming outcomes in Indian, Latin American, and Asian contexts, demonstrating
the universality of this model for agricultural development in reaching a multiplicity of
agricultural contexts globally, regardless of the outcomes (Glover, 2010b; Norberg, 2020; Luna
2020).
The next section applies the Liberalised Green Revolution framework to the case study of
economic liberalisation in India since the 1990s. I use the case studies of Bt cotton and tubewell
irrigation in semi-arid India to show that technology adoption potentially reinforces long term
indebtedness and stagnation in agricultural incomes from market integration (Blakeslee et al,
51
2020; Gutierrez et al, 2020). This, combined with rising costs of living relative to agricultural
incomes, has propagated the diversification towards multiple non-farm income sources.
2.3 The Liberalised Green Revolution in India
With the advent of the Green Revolution in the 1960s, agricultural policy making and farming
practices in developing countries underwent a rapid transformation, with the centrepiece being
India (Venkateshwar and Bandopadhyay, 2016). The sum of investments in seeds, inputs,
irrigation, mechanisation and subsidies plus institutional support increased rice and wheat
yields and output per hectare in India, transforming it from a food importer to exporter by the
1980s (Evenson and Gollin, 2003). However, for its detractors, the Green Revolution was
criticised for being concentrated within the richest, highest class/caste farmers (Lerche, 2011)
and geographically limited to 20 agroecologically favourable districts in three states in India
(Harriss-White and Janakarajan, 1997).
The long-term culmination of macroeconomic instability and the failure to repay debts to
international creditors brought India to an untenable economic scenario in 1991 (Banerjee and
Duflo, 2019). Agriculture was seen by liberalisation’s proponents to be afflicted by low
productivity, inefficiency and protectionist trade and price policies by the 1980s, when Green
Revolution yield returns began declining despite fertiliser, irrigation, credit, and power
subsidies making up 10% of agricultural GDP (Mukherjee and Kuroda, 2003; Panagariya,
2004; Fan et al, 2008). In exchange for a $6 billion bailout loan from the IMF to avoid
defaulting, the IMF and central and state governments India set out to liberalise the economy,
most notably the agricultural sector (ibid). Agricultural policy in the 1990s in India irrevocably
changed due to economic liberalisation in India. Agricultural reforms included scaling back
public sector credit, extension, and input subsidies, loosening of foreign direct investment
(FDI) in seeds, opening up export markets and enabling private sector competition in
agriculture (Reddy, 2006).
The Liberalised Green Revolution emphasised a private sector and decentralised market
competition driven agricultural intensification model (Alagh, 2018). The key differentiator was
the reach of agricultural technologies to the poorest of the poor of farmers in marginal regions
of India that were overlooked in the original Green Revolution. Dryland areas in India were
largely left out of the Green Revolution in irrigation and crop investments in favour of more
fertile regions (Bharucha, 2019), yet cover 53% of India’s geographical area, inhabited by
almost 400 million people (Harriss-White & Garikipati, 2008; Todmal 2019). Table 1 below
52
provides a comparative summary between the Green Revolution and Liberalised Green
Revolution.
Table 1 - Green Revolution vs Liberalised Green Revolution in India
Sources: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019); Vakulabharanam (2004); Ramachandran (2011);
Taylor (2013a); Chaudhuri (2019).
The reduced role of the public sector in the Liberalised Green Revolution created the entry and
competition of private sector intermediaries to take a lead role in credit, irrigation, seeds, input,
and extension services, driving a marketized, price competitive and decentralised form of
agricultural intensification (Srinivasulu, 2015). Millions of smallholder farmers in India
thereby transformed their subsistence cropping systems into commercial agriculture, entering
Green Revolution Liberalised Green Revolution
1960s-1970s 1990s-present
Public sector investments from central and state
governments in seeds, irrigation, credit, input
subsidies and extension services.
Decentralised intermediary led agricultural
intensification through private seed, credit, irrigation,
inputs and extension services
Aim to maximise yields and production of wheat and
rice for food security through hybrid high yielding
seeds, fertiliser, pesticides, and irrigation.
Adoption of Bt cotton, sugarcane, chillies, tobacco for
profit maximisation, exports, through hybrid GMO
seeds, fertiliser, pesticides and irrigation.
Institutional and public policy support to make inputs,
credit, irrigation, extension services work as a sum of
their parts.
Private sector intermediaries each functioning
separately for profit maximisation; adoption of credit,
inputs, seeds, irrigation without complementarity.
Targeted at large landholding classes and castes in
agroecologically favourable regions with alluvial soils
and aquifers and within canal command areas, high
irrigation coverage. Twenty districts in three states in
India.
Targeted at smallholder farmers in agroecologically
marginal regions, making up 86% of all landholdings,
covering 53% of geographical area of India.
High collateral and risk absorption capacity for large
landholders through access to subsidies in irrigation,
seeds and inputs. Low interest loan terms, price
supports from government in mitigating economic
risk from investments.
Low collateral, poor risk absorption capacity for
smallholder farmers. Reliance on high interest
informal credit to finance investments, little support
from government in crop price supports, exposure to
commodity price changes, full market prices to be
paid for inputs, irrigation, seeds.
Government the controller of markets, highly
interventionist in spending 10% of annual agricultural
GDP on subsidies.
Government the facilitator of markets since 1990s, but
in 2000s more interventionist in palliative welfare
policies for electoral support e.g., subsidies in
electricity, expansion of formal credit. Still premising
markets as driver of agricultural growth.
53
market relations completely for inputs, irrigation, extension, and harvest sale (Aggarwal,
2008). Proponents of liberalisation envisaged the teleological progress of agriculture in India
around three core tenets of privatisation, marketisation and technological intensification to
achieve higher growth, profitability, and yields. This was to culminate in the structural
transformation of the economy from agriculture to industrialisation (De Janvry, 2010). A
crucial part of this was the proliferation of credit in agriculture since the 1990s in India.
Historically in rural India, traditional trading and moneylending castes disbursed informal
credit at 24% to 36% interest rates to smallholder farmers at the village level, due to the poor
formal credit provision by the Indian government and their limited landholdings and collateral
size (Olsen, 1993). Credit was only used in emergency circumstances by pledging their land,
jewellery, or their own labour as exchange between moneylending landlord classes/castes and
lower castes over several years (Breman, 1994; Mohan, 2015). However, between the 1970s
and 1980s, the expansion of credit cooperatives and rural bank branches expanded formal credit
provision from 32% to 63% in rural India (Shah et al, 2007).
Economic reforms in the 1990s saw public sector credit decline again from 64% in 1991 to
57% in 2002, bringing moneylending to the fore again in rural India but expanded in scale and
size beyond the village level. Liberalisation diluted rigid caste structures at the village level
and saw moneylending castes migrate to cities to seek new business activities (Parthasarathy,
2013). This broadened moneylending to lower, Other Backward Castes (OBC) and expanded
the practise from the village level to towns, bringing thousands of providers eager to compete
and provide credit to finance the new private sector led growth in new commercial crop
varieties and irrigation (Vakulabharanam and Motiram, 2014). See Chapter 3 for an
explanation of the caste system in India.
For smallholder rainfed farmers, credit was offered by moneylenders and input dealers with
flexible terms such as minimal collateral requirements and long repayment terms in exchange
24% to 60% annual interest (Taylor, 2013b). In the 2000s, the Indian government reversed
public sector credit withdrawal in agriculture, in recognition of the financial distress and rising
levels of indebtedness caused by the monopolisation of the informal sector, increasing the share
of formal credit from 57% in 2002 to 72% in 2015 (Gulati and Juneja, 2019) as part of its
“financial inclusion” agenda to expand microcredit and bank accounts to the poor (Taylor,
2011; 2012).
54
In extension services, India mirrored global trends in public sector Research and Development
(R&D) investment slowdowns from the 1980s onwards, as the private sector was privileged as
the key innovator in agricultural technologies (Woodhouse, 2009; Oya, 2011). Agricultural
extension expenditure in India dropped from 7% of agricultural GDP per year in the 1980s to
2% per year between 1990 and 2005 (Sahay, 2010). Overall, real public sector expenditure
rates in agriculture were almost flat in the 1990s at 0.05% per year, in comparison to 3.71%
increase in private sector expenditure in agriculture (Mohan, 2015). In the 2000s, the Indian
government reversed its scaled back role in extension services, admitting in an agricultural
policy review in 2005 that agricultural growth in the 1990s was kept low by “weakened support
systems” and:
“unresponsive agricultural research, nearly broken-down extension [and] inadequate
seed production, distribution and regulation” (Ramakumar, 2009: p25).
In response to this, public spending on extension services doubled between 2007 and 2018,
while fertiliser subsidies increased by 3x in real terms to from $3.5 to $10.5 billion respectively
between 2000 and 2020 (OECD, 2018).
The Indian government’s spending increases in agriculture in the 2000s ostensibly revealed a
change in policy stance to pursue liberalisation less aggressively than in the 1990s (Himanshu,
2019). This was reflected in the government’s acknowledgement that agricultural growth in the
1990s was below expectations (Fan et al, 2008). In 11 rainfed states in India for example (where
>50% of crop area is unirrigated), agricultural growth declined from 3% between 1985-95 to
0.43% between 1996-2005 (Indian Planning Commission, 2008). Following the large increases
in public spending in agriculture in the early 2000s, real farm incomes once again grew by
6.1% per year from 2005-16, compared to only 2.4% per year between 1994-2005 (Chand,
2017).
However, as Jakobsen (2018) argues, although public investments into agriculture have
increased in recent decades, the government has still emphasised agricultural growth through
smallholder integration into markets. Empirical evidence suggests the general shift towards
agricultural commercialisation in India. For example, agricultural commodity exports
increased from $9 billion in 2005 to $33 billion in 2015, as the share of agricultural exports of
GDP in agriculture in India increased from 5% in 1990 to 16% in 2016 (OECD, 2018;
Himanshu, 2019). OECD data also showed that over 80% of the seed market is supplied by the
private sector, including 77% of all fertiliser sales (ibid), reflecting the dominance of the private
55
sector in agriculture. High value crops such as maize, soybeans, cotton, fruits, and vegetables
all increased in cultivated area and yield in rainfed areas between 1995-2005, while traditional
subsistence food crops such as pigeon peas, millets and sorghum production and yields
declined since the 1990s (Bhalla and Singh, 2009; Kannan and Sundaram, 2011). Consumption
of fertiliser also increased dramatically from 17.3 million tonnes in 2002 to 26 million tonnes
in 2017, reflecting the greater intensity of input application in agriculture (Gulati et al, 2020).
For farmers, agricultural commercialisation presented higher market prices but also increasing
cultivation costs of cash crops relative to traditional crops. For example, subsistence rainfed
crops pigeon pea, sorghum and castor cost $1.50 for pesticides and $3.50 in seed costs per
hectare (Michler, 2020). In comparison, soybeans cost $200 per hectare for pesticides and an
average of $50 per hectare in seed costs (ibid). The profit opportunity for private informal
lenders and input firms incentivised the marketing of agricultural technologies and credit to
smallholders (Bownas, 2016). As these cash crops required intensive application of inputs, it
guaranteed a revenue stream from an untapped market in smallholder farmers who made up
80% of India’s farmers in 1991 (NSSO, 1992).
Alongside agricultural liberalisation, the rural village in recent decades has also undergone
significant cultural and economic change with the entry of market transactions for household
consumption (Jodhka, 2014; Jakobsen and Nielsen, 2019). In rural India, increased rural
household expenditure on durable goods as a share of annual household spending increased
from 2.7% in 1993-4 to 6.1% in 2011-12 (NSSO, 2013a). Moreover, a rise in private
educational opportunities in nearby towns to rural villages also presented new opportunities for
social mobility for rural children but consequently higher household expenditures for
households (Azam et al, 2013; Kingdon, 2020). Longitudinal national household survey data
from agricultural households showed that investments in commercial agriculture and
household expenditure on durable goods, healthcare and education increased household
indebtedness by 7x from $109 in 1991 to $796 in 2020 (Surendra, 2020).
Much of this debt for smallholder farmers has been financed by informal credit, despite the
expansion of formal credit in recent decades. In India, 75% of medium and large farmers use
formal credit as their main source in India, relative to 49% for smallholder farmers (Gulati and
Juneja, 2019). Smallholder farmers borrow from informal creditors at high cumulative interest
rates, financing both agricultural and non-agricultural increases in household spending (Guerin
et al, 2013).
56
Despite the trajectory in India towards greater smallholder integration into markets and
commercialised cropping patterns, the inherent agroecological fragility of rainfed areas have
in some areas worsened the long term environmental and economic risks facing farmers
(Dhanagare, 2016). Commodity price risks and rising production costs in seeds, fertiliser, and
inputs have often not been met by the promises of higher market prices from high value crops
(Alagh, 2018). This is reflected in the rising indebtedness in smallholder households in recent
decades, increasing from 25% in 1992 to 57% in 2013 (Reddy et al, 2019).
Agricultural commercialisation in India since the 1990s has also had a minimal impact on rural
poverty reduction. As Datt et al (2020) find, agriculture contributed to 9% of the total poverty
reduction between 1991-2012, despite 43% of India’s workforce working in agriculture as a
main income (DES India, 2018). In addition, on average 25% of Indian smallholder farmers
would fall below the poverty line if not for non-farm incomes (Rahman and Mishra, 2019),
indicating heightened indebtedness via market integration without adequate income
improvements from the Liberalised Green Revolution. This is also clear in the composition of
agriculture in household farming incomes declining from 50% to 43% between 2002-16 (Gulati
et al, 2020). What has happened, Lerche (2015) observes, is that agricultural commercialisation
has created winners in richer classes and castes of farmers in favourable environments, while
creating agrarian crisis for smallholder farmers and heightening rural class and caste
differentiation in agriculture.
Finally, the environmental risks from agricultural intensification in recent decades have also
afflicted the sector. 37% of the total land area in India is affected by environmental degradation,
including 25% from desertification from factors such as excessive use fertilisers and pesticides,
over tillage and mechanisation of soils and poor irrigation management (OECD, 2018). Climate
change is also predicted to increase income volatility from agriculture. The frequency of floods
in India tripled between 1950-2012, as well as the severity and occurrences of drought events
(Adve, 2019). Extreme weather events are predicted to affect 25 million farmers in India
through yield losses and harvest failures, with India ranking fifth globally in the Climate
Vulnerability Index (India Spend, 2019).
Rainfall variability, climate shocks, higher temperatures are predicted to reduce agricultural
productivity between 10% and 40% by 2100, translating into 15-25% declines in production in
cash crops such as cotton (OECD, 2018). This is already becoming evident in pockets of rural
India, as yield growth in high value cash crops such as maize, soybeans and sugarcane has
57
declined from 3% per year from 2000-2005 to -5% between 2011-16 (ibid). Growth rates in
farmer incomes increased at 5.5% between 2005 and 2012, but slowed to 1.36% per year
between 2011-18, as the gross value-added figure of the crop sector increased at only 0.5% per
year from 2014-18 (Himanshu, 2019). This shows how the Liberalised Green Revolution is
already hitting economic and environmental trade-offs from intensification in India, even
before the effects to come from climate change in the future.
Although the government has scaled up the total volume of public sector investments in
numerous areas in the 2000s, the emphasis on market integration, commercial cropping to
transform the Indian smallholder continues in development discourse. This is despite emerging
evidence of higher indebtedness, yield and growth decline, environmental degradation, climate
change and the persistence of rural poverty in marginal and smallholder contexts in parts of
India almost three decades since liberalisation began. Vasavi (2019: p35-41) concludes:
“The hegemony of this ‘productivity-economic growth-high technology’ spectrum that
is the focus of all recent major agricultural and rural policies has several implications
for the viability of India’s agriculture, the sustainability of its ecological base, the social
bases of rural life…Using productivity as the key trope for agricultural, rural and
economic development of the nation has meant the promotion of dominant (external
input and capital-based) forms of agriculture, which defy the established agro-
ecological patterns of India’s agriculture… Agriculture has become, subsequent to such
technological interventions, an extractive economy failing to ensure either ecological
sustainability or economic viability.”
The following sections will explore the case studies of Bt cotton and groundwater irrigation
technologies in India. Under the aegis of the Liberalised Green Revolution, price competition,
informal credit access and marketing by private firms to the poorest farmers in semi-arid India
has propelled the country to become the biggest cotton grower and groundwater consumer
globally within a few decades (Gleeson et al, 2016; Flachs, 2020). Through an exploration of
environmental factors, credit/debt relations, market intermediaries and governments, the
chapter will attempt to understand how and why the technologies were adopted, with what
effect in marginal smallholder settings, and their implications for future rural livelihoods.
58
2.3.1 Cotton in the Liberalised Green Revolution
Cotton, referred to as “white gold” in India (Shah, 2012) has been heralded by Indian
agricultural policymakers as one of the key private sector success stories in the liberalisation
era. Cotton adoption and production accelerated amongst rainfed smallholder adopters via the
competition and expansion of local input and seed firms in the 1990s and 2000s (Stone and
Flachs, 2018; Chaudhuri, 2019). Today, India is the largest cotton producer by area and
production in the world at 11.6 million hectares (ISAAA, 2019), concentrated in the most
marginal regions of India.
Cotton production in India has a long history, with India being the export leader in the world
for raw cotton and textiles in the 17th century (Menon and Uzramma, 2017). The centrepiece
of the cotton story in India however was not the crop itself, but the politics of the seeds grown
to cultivate it (Kloppenburg, 2005). For much of India’s history, local cotton seeds were the
dominant variety, requiring low input use, saved between harvests each year and resistant to
local pests, but low yielding (Stone et al, 2007). From the 1970s onwards, government efforts
to replicate Green Revolution successes improve productivity in cotton saw the creation of high
yielding hybrid cotton varieties in Gujarat public universities (Stone et al, 2007; 2011).
Towards the late 1980s and 1990s, India pivoted to a more marketised agricultural policy in
seeds as the economy began to liberalise. In 1988, India implemented the New Policy on Seed
Development, a framework for accelerating private sector seed investments, and allowed 100%
FDI in the seed sector (Spielman et al, 2014). Private sector seed firms in India expanded
rapidly in the 1990s as a result. Private firms used the public sector hybrid cotton genetic
material, but iterated on them and bred new varieties for proprietary use and sale (Stone et al,
2014). Private input dealers marketed, sold, and proliferated cotton adoption amongst
smallholder farmers in India (Bownas, 2016), being a key driver of why the crop took off in
the Liberalised Green Revolution. Chapter 4 of the thesis examines this in further detail in the
case of Telangana.
A key aspect of hybrid cotton seeds was that seeds needed to be replaced each year and were
input intensive. Private seed sellers therefore expanded to selling inputs as well as seeds to
maximise profits, giving “pricing control to the seed company and also ensur[ing] a continuous
market” (Siddiqui, 2020: p1). The loosened regulations in the seed market and public sector
extension cutbacks in the 1990s however opened marketing practises such as companies selling
identical seeds under multiple different brands to farmers, expanding their product line and
59
revenue streams (Scoones, 2006). Decentralised seed firm competition and marketing
increased private hybrid cotton area in India from 33% to 66% of total cotton area between
1996 and 2004 (Stone, 2011).
Hybrid cotton seeds were also much more labour intensive than their indigenous varieties,
requiring the hiring of labour for the various stages of the growing process. In their study of
female cotton labourers in Andhra Pradesh in the 1990s, Venkateshwarlu and Da Corta (2001)
find that over a typical cotton season, hybrid cotton required 2,216 labour days compared to
250 days for indigenous cotton. Much of the labour was done by women and children, chosen
for their compliance to discipline on the farm and ability to work for lower wages (Da Corta
and Venkateshwarlu, 1999). Even despite using cheap and exploitable labour force of women
and children, labour costs were extremely expensive for even landlord classes, in part due to
the labour intensive nature of the crop (ibid).
Private hybrid cotton adoption in India had a number of effects in terms of risk, debt and
vulnerability for the farmer. Although cotton only occupied 5% of India’s total cropping area,
it accounted for around 50% of all pesticide use in the country in the 1990s, as the crop was
prone to pests such as the bollworm (Flachs, 2020). This offset high yields from cotton with
high costs from pesticide use. By the late 1990s, the government sought a technical fix to the
hybrid cotton pest problem via private sector innovation (Ekers and Prudham, 2018), without
changing the dynamics within the seed market, bringing Bt cotton.
2.3.2 Bt cotton in India
Hybrid cotton increased farmer yields, growth, and profitability in India but these were
tempered by rising debts from increasing pesticide usage to handle predation by the bollworm
pest (Ramani et al, 2015). In reaction to this, the Indian government turned to biotechnology
under the “gene revolution” (Parayil, 2003).
Bt cotton emerged out of several domestic and international developments. As far back as the
1980s, the Indian government recognised that biotechnology was a potential replacement to fix
the diminishing returns from Green Revolution technologies (Bhuyan and Pray, 2019). It
created the Department of Biotechnology under the Ministry of Science and Technology in the
late 1980s, a research, policy and regulatory body for the development and approval of
transgenic crops (ibid). Activity on the biotechnology front however did not pick-up pace until
the late 1990s, when the public then private iterations of hybrid seeds were hitting biophysical
60
limits. As Suresh et al (2013: p45) explain, the Indian government moved to put in place the
Cotton Technology Mission towards the end of the 1990s, whose aim was:
“To increase the production and productivity of cotton by increasing the yield, farm
income, domestic availability and exports by research and technology transfer,
development of infrastructure and technology upgradation and modernization in
processing sector.”
The state’s role was to facilitate capital accumulation, to create the conditions for the market
to find a way to innovate (Jakobsen, 2018) and fix the pest problems afflicting hybrid cotton
through biotechnology. The market leader globally in cotton biotechnology development was
Monsanto, a US based agri-business firm. In the 1990s they developed and marketed Bt cotton,
a genetically engineered cotton strain containing a soil bacterium that bound to bollworm pest
DNA and killed it after the cotton leaf or bud was ingested (Flachs, 2016). In 1998, Monsanto
bought a 26% stake in Mahyco, an Indian seed firm, forming the joint venture Monsanto-
Mayhco Biotech for use of existing Indian hybrid cotton strains to breed Bt cotton for India.
This also ensured easier regulatory approval through Mayhco’s extensive government
connections (Bownas, 2016). By 2005, Bt cotton was approved for sale across India, despite
much protest and controversy by anti-GM groups (Scoones, 2006). Bt cotton was marketed as
solving the bollworm pest predation and bring higher yields, lower pesticide cost and greater
farmer profitability compared to non-Bt strains (Herring and Rao, 2012). In exchange, Bt
cotton required higher seed and fertiliser costs, which were entirely borne by the farmer
(Ramamurthy, 2011).
In just under two decades, Bt cotton covered 95% of India’s cotton area (Kukanur et al, 2018)
across 10 cotton growing states. This occurred through a decentralised network of private
sector seed firms promoting, marketing, and selling Bt cotton directly to farmers in thousands
of towns and village peripheries across India (Chaudhuri, 2019). Since Bt cotton was
introduced, India went from the 4th highest cotton producer and area in the world to the 1st,
making up 48% of the global Bt cotton area and increasing yields from 300kg/ha to 542kg/ha
between 2000 and 2018 (Sharma et al, 2018; Siddiqui, 2020). Bt cotton in India however is
deeply contested, making India the centrepiece of ongoing GM debates in the world (Scoones,
2008). Stone (2012) characterises these debates as the battle over the “construction of facts”,
as each side validates their victory through various institutional, ideological, and
methodological means (Glover, 2010b; Schnurr, 2017; Luna and Dowd-Uribe, 2020).
61
2.3.3 Pro-Bt cotton groups and their detractors
Bt cotton evangelists comprised of industry and government agricultural scientists, economists,
biotechnology firms, and policy makers in India and the USA (Gutierrez et al, 2020). The main
arguments in favour of Bt cotton were the resistance to bollworm pests, reducing pesticide
burdens compared to non-Bt cotton (Dowd-Uribe, 2017). Gruere and Sengupta (2011) found
income increases of 54%, reduction in pesticide costs by 45%, and a 39% increase in yield
relative to non-Bt cotton, in exchange for 15% higher cultivation costs. Studies using a six-
year panel data in four states in India between 2003-8 also found a 24% increase in yield per
acre, 50% higher profits and 52% pesticide reduction, which caused an 18% increase in
household consumption expenditure (Qaim et al, 2009; Kathage and Qaim, 2012). Rainfed Bt
cotton also produced higher yields than rainfed non-Bt cotton in Telangana, while irrigated Bt
cotton showed 35% higher yields than irrigated non-Bt cotton (Dev and Rao, 2007).
Bt cotton supporters concluded that smallholder farmer outcomes and welfare improved with
Bt cotton (Herring, 2008). Evidently, as Herring and Rao (2012) argue, there was no reason for
6 million smallholder farmers in India to adopt Bt cotton if it did not bring yield, pesticide, and
profitability improvements. Bt cotton was the best of a limited set of options for smallholders,
and so farmers were willing to take on high capital and debt risks in exchange for higher profits
(Wield et al, 2010). Finally, the willingness of smallholder farmers to adopt Bt cotton for its
supporters was proof of their agency in improving their own material conditions and aspiring
for a better life through these new technologies (Shah, 2012; Luna, 2019).
Bt cotton’s most ardent opponents were anti-GM groups. These comprised of local and
international NGOs, consumer activist groups, academics, and farmer groups in India, using
organised protests, reports, articles and studies by journalists and NGOs to oppose Bt cotton
(Scoones, 2006). Fischer et al (2015) point out that anti-GM groups warned of higher corporate
concentration within the seed industry, higher input prices, intellectual property regimes that
made it illegal for farmers to save and reuse seeds and takeover of agriculture via corporate
globalisation (Herring and Paarlberg, 2016). The aim for anti-GM groups was not only to
change the public sentiment against Bt cotton in India and win the moral debate, but to unveil
the reality of Bt cotton adoption for farmer welfare (Scoones, 2008).
Fears by anti-GM groups of corporate takeovers were mixed. For instance, most Bt cotton sales
happened through Monsanto-Mahyco licensing their seeds to 42 national level private sector
seed companies in India (Chauduri, 2019). These firms then resold their seeds to thousands of
62
local affiliate input and seed firms, who sold to the farmer directly (Ramamurthy, 2011). Bt
cotton increased the private sector’s influence, but by expanding the total size of the market
and increasing decentralised competition between thousands of local seed firms, rather than
concentration of multi-national firms (Spielman et al, 2014).
Another critique by anti-GM groups was that intellectual property traits of Bt cotton made it
illegal for farmers to save, exchange and reuse seeds year on year. Yet, as Monsanto engineered
Bt cotton used existing private hybrid cotton strains from Mahyco, it just represented a
continuation of proprietary hybrid seeds in India from the 1990s by private seed firms
(Siddiqui, 2020). The real problem therefore was not intellectual property, but the lack of
regulation in the seeds industry, evident since the 1990s with cotton. Local seed firms were in
fact the propagators of Bt cotton expansion, rather than the much feared national and
international seed firms by the anti-GM groups (Stone and Flachs, 2015; Chaudhuri, 2019).
Finally, a set of scholars in academia have argued for an intermediate approach to evaluating
Bt cotton in India. Their main argument is the acknowledgement that Bt cotton does bring
profitability in some cases, but little is discussed about the political economy context of how,
where, and why it was adopted and who benefits (Dowd-Uribe, 2017; Smale, 2017). The first
factor studied by this group was the implications of liberalisation and the private seed market.
Upon Bt cotton’s introduction in India in 2002, the explosion of competition, light regulation
and growth of the private seed sector created 1128 varieties of Bt cotton as of 2015, covering
95% of all cotton area in India (Kukanur et al, 2018).
The rapid expansion of the seed market and promotion by seed sellers led to “agricultural
deskilling” of the farmer in making seed selections, unable to comprehend the rapid changes
in the market. Input dealers marketed new seed fads through word of mouth and promoting the
seeds to the large and high caste landowners in a village, who then spread it via word of mouth
(Flachs, 2016). Maertens (2017) reveals through her research in Maharashtra that after these
first adopters grew Bt cotton in the village, 91% of lower caste and class cotton farmers copied
them and adopted Bt cotton within a year. Farmers relied on a hierarchical form of social
learning from input dealers and first adopter farmers, replacing any individual learning,
iteration, or experimentation (Stone et al, 2014). The constant disruption, unrecognizability,
and proprietary nature of Bt cotton seeds prevented farmers from learning how to cultivate Bt
cotton crops (ibid).
63
Ethnographic fieldwork from Andhra Pradesh also revealed that seed dealers made 10-15%
profit margin on each seed packet sold, incentivising them to maximise seed and input sales
(Bownas, 2016). Input dealers promoted higher pesticide and fertiliser use for guaranteed
higher yields (Stone and Flachs, 2018). Furthermore, as Chaudhuri (2019) explains, national
seed companies that distributed and licensed the seeds offered sign on bonuses for new seed
dealers to enter the market. Names for the seeds like Diamond and Force and different colours
for the packets were all ways in which seed firms differentiated and market identical seed types
(Scoones, 2006).
The marketing and sales tactics in Bt cotton to maximise farmer adoption at any cost runs
counter to proponents’ claim that adoption was the farmer’s agency based on its profitability
and self-evident performance (Wield et al, 2010). Farmers trusted the authority of input dealers
given the absence of the government in regulation or extension services in Liberalised Green
Revolution. This thesis also identifies a gap of the third role input dealers played, as not only
salesperson and extension advisor but also credit provider, helping to finance Bt cotton for
smallholders. In Chapter 4, the thesis explores the reinforcing debt relations and Bt cotton profit
maximising extension advice given by input dealers as the key factor for farmer indebtedness
and heavy investments in inputs. Moreover, scholars also questioned the yield improvements
in Bt cotton claimed by pro-Bt groups, a key selling point of the crop. Figures 4 and 5 below
shows cotton yields and area in India from 1950-2019, with the period after 2002 representing
the Bt cotton era.
Figure 4 - Cotton Yields in India 1950-2019
Source: DES India (2018; 2019b)
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64
Figure 5 - Cotton Area in India 1950-2019
Source: DES India (2018; 2019b)
In the Bt cotton era, Figures 4 and 5 show that yields markedly improved between 2002-7, but
stagnated since, even though Bt cotton area continued to increase. Also, India still has one of
the lowest average yields in the world at 563kg/ha compared to the world average of 784 kg/ha,
bettered by many non Bt-cotton countries (Sharma et al, 2018). Kranthi and Stone (2020)
summarise that since 2005 when Bt cotton yields almost peaked, per hectare seed costs
increased by 78%, pesticide costs increased by 158%, fertiliser costs increased by 245% and
labour costs increased by 275% due to also increases in agricultural labour wages via
MNREGA (ibid). Glover (2010b) argues that whilst Bt cotton may have reduced pesticide
usage and controlled the bollworm pest problem, new secondary pests have emerged in recent
years which have been the limiting factor for yields. Advice from input dealers to continue
over spraying and fertilising has led to farmers increasing their financial risk and indebtedness
with limited yield improvement (Gutierrez et al, 2018).
Furthermore, 66% of Bt cotton area was in semi-arid, low rainfall environments with
unpredictable monsoons. This thesis explores the gap of why Bt cotton is rainfed and argues
how this is the key factor in its failure in adopting areas. In Chapters 4 and 5 of this thesis, I
argue that the role of the input dealer as salesperson and extension advisor increased Bt cotton
adoption in semi-arid areas under worsening monsoons, despite the risks to the farmer of
growing such a capital and input intensive crop in these conditions. As Smale (2017) concludes,
rather than problems with Bt cotton, the bigger factor in causing the failure of Bt cotton has
been social and agroecological context of technology adoption for smallholder farmers.
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65
Hybrid and Bt cotton were key Liberalised Green Revolution technologies, spreading to rainfed
and semi-arid areas of India and adopted by millions of poor and marginal farmers. In the
1990s, liberalisation in the cotton sector proliferated private sector competition, as input firms
marketed and sold high yielding cotton seeds, while also selling complimentary inputs and
disbursing credit. Hybrid seeds promised higher yields but were not reusable year-to-year,
requiring annual reinvestments and intensive input requirements. In the long term, it was the
lack of pest resistance to the bollworm that drove up harvest failures and pesticide costs with
hybrid cotton by the end of the 1990s.
Turning to the market to fix the mess they had a role in making through deregulation (Ekers
and Prudham, 2018), the Indian government pursued private sector biotechnology innovation
in cotton. This led to Monsanto’s Bt cotton entry into India in 2002, a genetically modified pest
resistant cotton seed variety. For supporters, evidence showed that Bt cotton reduced pesticide
costs, leading to higher incomes versus non-Bt cotton. Furthermore, the uptake by smallholder
farmers was an active desire by farmers to adopt this new technology and improve their
profitability. More scrutiny over time however has revealed many negative effects of Bt cotton.
Non-reusable traits from hybrid cotton were retained, so farmer deskilling persisted and
accelerated as private competition in seeds increased rapidly, creating thousands of
unrecognisable, unverified, and increasing volume of seed brands.
Incentives to maximise seed and input sales at any cost for the input dealer drove over
fertilisation and pesticide use, locking in farmers to increasing input costs and debts taken from
input dealers on high interest informal credit. The adoption of water intensive Bt cotton in
rainfed and semi-arid areas also exacerbated farmer risk. Ultimately, Bt cotton yields stopped
increasing after 2007, while fertiliser use, cropping area and pesticide use all increased.
Expectations of capital, water and input intensive technologies to succeed in semi-arid
environments has instead created insecurity through Bt cotton in the Liberalised Green
Revolution. In this section, I also identified several gaps in the Bt cotton literature to investigate
in Chapters 4 and 5, namely why it is rainfed, the credit and debt relations between input dealers
and farmers, and the triple role of input dealers as creditor, salesperson and extension advisor.
The story of groundwater irrigation, the second flagship Liberalised Green Revolution
technology, shall be explored in the next section, revealing many of the same patterns as Bt
cotton, but with distinctive differences.
66
2.3.4 Transitions in groundwater irrigation in India
For much of India’s history, irrigation was the remit of the government, pursued via dams and
canals (Mollinga, 2008). Between 1950-1993, 85% of all government spending on irrigation
projects were dedicated to surface irrigation, and India also received $33 billion in World Bank
loans for dam construction projects during this period (Shah, 2010). Yet, the majority of India
was still left untouched by public sector irrigation as millions of farmers were located outside
of canal command areas, with access to water only possible from the monsoon, or from
groundwater from underground aquifers (Vasavi, 2020). Since the 1970s however, a series of
policy changes and the liberalisation of the irrigation sector has enabled the vast expansion and
affordability of groundwater irrigation in India, making up 84% of all new irrigated area created
in India in this time (Pahuja et al, 2010). Compared to canals and dams, groundwater irrigation
provides private and decentralised access to water, requiring no additional infrastructural
investment other than an energy supply, pipes, and a pump (Lall et al, 2020). The most
significant of these has been the tubewell, a technologically advanced form of groundwater
irrigation that relies on submersible pump system that draws water from hundreds of feet
underground powered by electricity or diesel supplies (MoWR, 2017).
Tubewells were an import from the UK during the British colonial era in the 19th century,
promoted and sold by the Indian government to wealthy farmers to irrigate commercial crops
through favourable loans and subsidies (Subramanian, 2015). However, as a share of the total
irrigation area, tubewells only contributed to 10% of the total irrigated area in 1970, a big
reason down to their prohibitive cost of $10,000 (Freed and Freed, 2002; DES India, 2018).
In the 1990s, liberalisation induced a shift from public sector surface irrigation to a private and
decentralised “democratised” groundwater irrigation (Taylor, 2013a). As with Bt cotton, the
growth of informal credit also paved the way for private sector firms to enter market
competition in tubewell irrigation. In the Liberalised Green Revolution, market competition
and profit incentives for irrigation firms maximised farmer adoption in semi-arid environments
by smallholder farmers who were a large target market and had access to credit to invest in the
technology (Vakulabharanam, 2004). Overall, groundwater irrigation created 3x more gross
irrigated area since the 1970s than surface irrigation created in the previous 150 years (Shah,
2009). So far however, the literature has paid little attention on the role of private irrigation
firms as drivers of tubewell expansion in India. Chapter 5 of the thesis explains the key role of
private irrigation firms in the tubewell political economy in the Liberalised Green Revolution.
67
The shift for Shah (2010) was from a supply driven, government led and managed irrigation,
to a demand driven, smallholder led and managed, private, and decentralised irrigation.
Smallholder farmers in semi-arid areas financed irrigation on informal credit, and benefited
from price competition of tubewell pumps in 1990s, coming down from $10,000 in the late
1970s to $1,000 in 1999 (Alary, 1999). The transformation of rainfed agriculture into irrigated
agriculture also shifted cropping patterns towards cash crops, increasing rural incomes and
helping to reduce rural poverty in India (Narayanamoorthy, 2015). Today, tubewells make up
51% of total irrigated area in India at 31 million hectares (DES India, 2018). Moreover,
groundwater irrigation helps produce 49% of the rice and 72% of wheat grown in India,
(Smilovic, 2015), playing a pivotal role in agricultural production.
However, 66% of the tubewell area is underlain by hard rock aquifers (Mukherjee, 2018) and
feature a semi-arid climate, where rainfall is scarce. In hard rock aquifer areas, groundwater
availability is highly unpredictable, and aquifers have a low storage capacity, so groundwater
is found in limited quantities in interstitial cracks and fissures and in the rock, requiring
multiple drill attempts to successfully extract groundwater (Marechal, 2010; Fishman et al,
2011). Low aquifer storage can be depleted by erratic monsoon seasons and intensive drilling
if the extraction rates exceeded rates of recharge from rainfall (Asoka et al, 2018). In semi-arid
hard rock areas therefore, aquifer overexploitation becomes worse as the number of farmers
adopting tubewells increases, intensifying demand for the same aquifer (Jacoby, 2017). In
addition, the high capital investments for the irrigation system are often by financed by
smallholder farmers through informal, high interest credit, whose repayment structures rely
upon irrigated cash crop agriculture (Taylor, 2013a).
Drill failures and aquifer overexploitation has often pushed farmers into simultaneous
indebtedness from crop and irrigation investments in semi-arid areas. This cycle of risk and
debt in certain cases drove farmers to drill further in a chance to strike water and recoup their
losses, perpetuating the problem once more (Blakeslee et al, 2020). Climatic trends in the future
in India are likely to see increased drought events and shorter monsoons, which will only add
to the biophysical barriers of tubewell expansion in semi-arid and hard rock aquifer regions
(Hora et al, 2019). In the literature however, few authors have explained how farmers came to
drill wells so intensively. In Chapter 5, I show the pivotal role of informal credit and private
irrigation firms acting as salesperson and extension advisor and encouraging intensive drilling,
as with input dealers and Bt cotton in Chapter 4.
68
Equally, tubewell overexploitation has also been driven by political economy contradictions in
Indian policy making. In India, common law from the British colonial era allowed private
landowners unlimited water rights to groundwater under their land, whereas the aquifer is a
common pool resource for all users (Sekhri, 2011). In the Liberalised Green Revolution, this
incentivised farmers to drill for water in a zero-sum game on their farm, creating competition
for a finite water source in a deregulated drilling economy (Shah, 2010). Exacerbating the
problem further, the bureaucratic and transaction costs to register, price and police individual
farmers and wells for their water use has become a logistical impossibility in India (Mukherji
and Shah, 2005), a country with 20 million wells owned by 90 million households (Sidhu et al,
2020).
Electricity policy has also created similar perverse incentives for groundwater overexploitation
in India. In the 1960s, governments could charge market rates for electricity as enforcement
was manageable with a low number of irrigation users. However, rapid groundwater adoption
made the costs of metering, regulating, and collecting electricity revenues at the individual
farmer level untenable (Shah et al, 2012). The growing groundwater farmer base also created
a powerful voting bloc who advocated for subsidised electricity. So, to solve the political and
governance problem, many state governments since the 1970s enacted a subsidised flat tariff
rate, which removed the price signal for farmers in regulating their electricity and groundwater
use (Sishodia et al, 2016).
Even in the liberalisation era, these policies persisted alongside liberalisation elsewhere in
agriculture as electricity subsidies increased from $4.4 billion per year in 1996 to $11.4 billion
in 2013, accounting for 25% of the national fiscal deficit (Sidhu et al, 2020). Chapter 5
addresses a gap in the literature by linking both irrigation firms and electricity subsidies in
driving up well densities and overexploitation through creating a zero-marginal cost for drilling
groundwater.
This section has shown tubewell extraction must be understood as a hybrid of ecological and
political economy factors in India (Swyngedouw, 2009). The next section explores the political
economy of why the expansion of tubewell irrigation has taken place the way it did in India.
69
2.3.5 Tubewells and the Liberalised Green Revolution
Groundwater irrigation access in India has been critical for millions of farmers outside of canal
and dam catchment areas, who reside in low rainfall semi-arid areas. By the early 1990s,
economic liberalisation policies incentivised private irrigation firms to market and maximise
irrigation adoption by smallholder farmers in semi-arid areas and hard rock aquifers, financed
by the informal credit (Vasavi, 2020).
Figure 6 shows the growth of tubewells in India from 1950-2014, as tubewells overtook canals
in 1995 to become the dominant irrigation type, making up 51% of total net irrigated area in
India or 31 million hectares as of 2018 (DES India, 2018). For its role in agricultural growth,
Shah (2010) estimates that groundwater irrigation contributes to $8.6bn per year in agricultural
productivity.
Figure 6 - Irrigation Area by Source in India 1950-2014
Source: DES India (2018)
Much of the growth in tubewell irrigation has been in hard rock aquifer environments. These
are characterised by heterogeneity in groundwater availability, low recharge capacity, low
storage capacity, and deeper depths required to locate reliably yielding aquifers in the rock
(Shah, 2012). The dominant regions with hard rock aquifers are also in semi-arid climates.
Semi-arid climates are often drought prone and exhibit unreliable or failing monsoons in timing
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70
and length, typically also having higher evapotranspiration rates than precipitation received,
therefore a low recharge of rainfall into aquifers (Deb et al, 2014). These are precisely the areas
where intensive competition, expanding area, increasing numbers of adopters and harsh
climatic conditions have caused water tables to deepen (Jacoby, 2017). To find a working
aquifer source requires drilling hundreds of metres and multiple times until successful, costing
up to $1,000 (Blakeslee et al, 2020).
The density of numbers of tubewells in hard rock aquifer regions has created what Shah (2010)
terms “zero sum competitive deepening”, where the groundwater scarcity has made farmers
double down on well drilling, in the process deepening water tables and drying out aquifers.
Kumar et al (2011) estimate that in Andhra Pradesh, rising tubewell densities have reduced the
average irrigated area created by tubewells from 1.8ha in 2001 to 1.07ha in 2011. Often,
smallholder farmers grew cash crops to repay their irrigation investments and maximise
returns. Yet in a semi-arid competitive drilling environment, this further deepened indebtedness
and risk if both crop and irrigation system fail (Taylor, 2013a). Chapter 5 uncovers the
additional role of irrigation firms in encouraging drilling and rising tubewell densities by
smallholder farmers and the debt implications this has.
One key technological change under the Liberalised Green Revolution were the expansion of
submersible pump technologies, a superior pump technology that was capable of pumping
water from up to 300m, up to 10x previous pump technologies (MoWR, 2017). In the 1990s,
market competition from private irrigation firms drove down the price of submersible pumps
(Narayanamoorthy, 2015). Fieldwork from Punjab by Tiwary and Sabatier (2009) found that
submersible pumps became ubiquitous for tubewell users in the 1990s and 2000s because of
declining water tables, necessitating deeper wells to be drilled. While submersible pumps
enabled farmers to tap into deeper groundwater tables, in hard rock areas, this only exacerbated
tubewell overexploitation.
As early as the 1960s, hard rock aquifers were recognised as unsuitable for intensive
groundwater development (Rao, 2014). A major problem in semi-arid and hard rock aquifer
areas is the availability of groundwater confined to minimal spaces, cracks, and fissures in rock
formations, requiring multiple attempts to drill a successful well. Kumar et al (2011) also note
that red laterite soils in semi-arid areas have a poor infiltration capacity and the depth of the
water tables in hard rock aquifers make recharge and percolation from rainfall difficult. Bassi
71
et al (2008) estimate that only 4-10% of total rainfall in hard rock areas flows back to recharge
aquifers.
Tubewell overexploitation has been a persistent problem for adopting farmers in semi-arid hard
rock areas. This has been evident not only in India, but globally too, in Iran, Jordan, Mexico
and Pakistan (Shah et al, 2006; Karimi et al, 2012; Al-Naber and Molle, 2017; Hoogesteger,
2018). In a study in the state of Karnataka in India, Blakeslee et al (2020) found that drilling
wells cost double the median household cash income of smallholder farmers, and that wells on
average failed within 5 years of drilling. Households that had failed wells had to sell assets or
fall into debt, having to offset agricultural losses through non-farm incomes (ibid). Other
scholars found in India that if their wells failed, the sunk costs were too high to revert to rainfed
agriculture, inducing further tubewell and crop investments to recoup losses (Ferrant et al,
2014).
2.3.6 Individual incentives and institutional failures
The limits to growth of tubewell irrigation in the Liberalised Green Revolution cannot simply
be attributed to the underlying biophysical characteristics of adopting areas. Resource
degradation in marginal areas are determined by an interlocking set of physical, social,
economic, and demographic factors that explain why farmers practise these livelihood
strategies (Kuchimanchi et al, 2019). In India’s political economy in the Liberalised Green
Revolution, the outcomes of aquifer depletion can also be explained by policy decisions at the
state and national level. As Sultana (2013: p343) notes:
“Technologies and the social formations they are embedded in reflect the political
rationality and development trajectories of the state. No water technology is neutral; it
is saturated with historical, geographical, political, and social imaginaries… Water
technologies are developed, rolled out, fought over, reformed, dismantled, and
redesigned in various ways through the social histories of place, networks of power,
and discourses of development.”
Reflecting the above passage, tubewell irrigation expansion was a function of the political
economy dynamics in India. One the one hand, the opening of irrigation and credit markets
incentivised irrigation and informal credit expansion by private intermediaries in the
Liberalised Green Revolution, occupying the space left by the state in irrigation infrastructure
expansion. At the same time, the government incentivised groundwater development through
the electricity subsidy lever.
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Hoogesteger and Wester (2015) delineate intensive groundwater development into two
interrelated factors: the first being the material reconfiguration of rainfed agriculture from a
subsistence cropping system to a irrigated commercial agricultural system. The second are the
policies and policy discourse that enable the first. In India, this has centred around electricity
subsidies.
Initially, in the 1960s and 1970s, electricity for groundwater was charged at a metered rate,
with monitoring and revenue collection managed by electricity boards at the state government
level (Mukherji and Shah, 2005). As tubewell expansion rapidly accelerated into the 1980s and
1990s, increasingly powerful farmer lobbies pressured state governments to subsidise
electricity tariffs in groundwater irrigation (Dubash, 2002). Facing pressure from this new
major political constituency, several state governments in India set a fixed tariff for electricity
(Sidhu et al, 2020). This move was also forced for state governments facing huge transactions
costs to monitor, price, regulate and collect electricity revenues in a rapidly rising tubewell
boom (Scott and Shah, 2004).
Hence, a fixed rate tariff was the solution to a political and governance problem. Unfortunately,
this move was financially disastrous and politically irreversible, as the cost of maintaining and
increasing electricity generation for a mass of tubewell users caused state governments to face
huge losses from subsidising electricity (Rajan et al, 2020). Yet, political pressure from farmers
meant they could not increase tariffs (Shah et al, 2012). For instance, in 1998, as Taylor (2013a)
explains, the Andhra Pradesh TDP Chief Minister, backed by the World Bank, proposed
electricity pricing for groundwater as part of liberalisation reforms, but thousands of farmers
protested throughout the state to force a policy reversal back to subsidised electricity by 2000.
By the next elections state elections in 2004, the ruling party lost, and the winning Congress
party gained power based on their electoral promise of 7 hours of free electricity per day for
groundwater users (ibid).
Even at a time of fiscal restraint elsewhere in the Liberalised Green Revolution, electricity
subsidies for groundwater irrigation continued to drain on public finances (Siegfried et al,
2010). Between 1960-2016, electricity consumption for groundwater increased 235x,
compared to total electricity usage increase of 77x in the same period (Sidhu et al, 2020).
Moreover, groundwater governance of water has had similar difficulty in enforcing regulation
and pricing as electricity (Sekhri, 2011). Groundwater is a common pool resource, but
following a colonial era law in India from the 1860s, farmers have unlimited access to
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groundwater on their private land (ibid). Additionally, it is impossible to control the flow of
groundwater given the heterogenous availability of water within fissures and differing depths.
This makes it difficult to exclude farmers who overexploit as there is no way of disaggregating
which farmer uses more than others (Scott and Sharma, 2009), incentivising a zero sum well
competition amongst users.
For farmers, the near zero cost of electricity and limited regulation incentivised greater
groundwater use, driving them to competitively drill for tubewells to recoup their investments
in inputs and irrigation technologies financed by high interest informal credit (Taylor, 2013a;
Sishodia et al, 2017). In hard rock aquifer environments, farmers already faced scarce
groundwater resources, so the added desperation to repay debtors means farmers often doubled
down on tubewells to their detriment of well failures (Blakeslee et al, 2020).
Although the Indian government has been active in electricity subsidy policy, provision for
extension services for irrigation has been absent. Pahuja et al (2010) note that groundwater
irrigation departments in India have long been underfunded, plagued by vacancies and their
remit being limited to technical groundwater surveying and mapping, rather than sharing
groundwater management advice with farmers (Mukherji and Shah, 2005). In Chapter 5 of the
thesis, like with Bt cotton, I show how the Liberalised Green Revolution political economy has
left the extension advice to the irrigation firms, who are also the irrigation salesperson. I
demonstrate how the monopoly of irrigation firms encouraged tubewell expansion in
Telangana despite the unsuitability of the climate and aquifer conditions.
Climate effects are predicted to increase rainfall intensity, droughts and shorten monsoon
seasons, alongside uncertainty in timing, length, and reliability of rainfall in the monsoon
(Mishra et al, 2020). As 67% of aquifer recharge in India comes from rainfall (Asoka et al,
2018), climate change is likely to exacerbate harvest and aquifer failures and the desperation
of drilling behaviour if groundwater is scarcer (Ferrant et al, 2014). Rajan et al (2020) also find
that groundwater electricity consumption alone contributes to 10-12% of India’s annual GHG
emissions, concentrated in nine states where electricity is subsidised the heaviest and where
groundwater decline is the highest in India.
Overall, in India, populist political incentives, poor regulation capacity, hydrogeological and
agroecological conditions and private markets created tubewell expansion and
overexploitation. In the Liberalised Green Revolution, market forces and public sector
withdrawal saw private irrigation firms promote water intensive crops and tubewells to
74
smallholder farmers in semi-arid and hard rock areas with little risk bearing capacity. Irrigation
investments required high capital investments reliant on informal credit. In many cases
however, the risks and investment were increased without return, as farmers faced repeated
well failure and indebtedness cycles due to the fragile ecological settings where tubewell
expansion occurred. Therein, agricultural intensification in the Liberalised Green Revolution
took place in a significantly riskier environmental and socio-economic setting relative to the
Green Revolution.
Within this, the government was involved in a limited but consequential way. Subsidised
electricity increased competition for groundwater in a water scarce aquifer landscape. Farmers
drilled for tubewells multiple times to find a working water source, maximising their water
consumption to recoup farm and irrigation investments. The burden of electricity subsidies
alleviated expenses in the short term for farmers but exacerbated overexploitation of aquifers,
and drove up fiscal deficits at the state level. The chapter also unveiled a few gaps to be
explored in later chapters. The final section of this literature review will explore the
consequences of the Liberalised Green Revolution for rural livelihoods in India.
2.3.7 The Liberalised Green Revolution and the consequences for future agrarian
livelihoods
In part due to the political economy conditions of the Liberalised Green Revolution,
dependence of farmers on agriculture in India has decreased in the 21st century, placing greater
emphasis on non-farm incomes to supplement agriculture (Rahman and Mishra, 2019). In rural
India, this move towards non-farm livelihoods is also part of the structural transformation of
the economy in India out of agriculture and into higher value-added sectors such as service
work (Lanjouw et al, 2013). This is especially the case within the younger, educated
generations in farming households who have sought out social mobility and a life outside of
labour intensive agriculture by their parents (Jakimow, 2014; Agarwal and Agrawal, 2017).
However, the Indian labour market and economy has also faced non-farm stagnation in the last
decade, creating what economic commentators’ term as the “lost decade” for India’s economy
(Kaul, 2019). Since the financial crisis in 2008, job creation has been slow and limited to low
paid and low skilled construction or agricultural labour, unable to meet the formal, city-based
job demands of young, educated rural jobseekers (Mehra, 2019). Economic growth has not
been in pace with formal job creation, causing high rural underemployment and unemployment
75
amongst educated youth (Jose Thomas, 2020). This section explores the political economy of
rural livelihoods in India in the Liberalised Green Revolution era.
2.3.8 Non-farm diversification
Diminishing land sizes, rising costs of cultivation, debt, climate risk and output and price
instability have made farmers diversify into non-farm work in the Liberalised Green
Revolution to supplement agricultural incomes (Sanghera, 2019). Agriculture is increasingly
the remit of older, lesser-educated generations of rural households, whereas educated younger
generations have favoured non-farm livelihoods (Hebinck, 2018). Agriculture remains a
primary occupation in India for 43% of India’s workforce (DES India, 2018) but is often
unremunerative for smallholder farmers.
On the other hand, for those classes of farmers that have benefited from capitalism in
agriculture, such as larger landholding classes, they have mobilised politically and
economically to diversify and reinvest their agricultural surpluses into different industries. In
India, large landholding classes in the 1960s and 1970s that benefited from improved
agricultural productivity in the Green Revolution in rice and wheat crops diversified into real
estate, agricultural trading, politics and moneylending (Damodaran, 2008; Parthasarathy, 2013;
Prasad; 2015).
This has not been the case however for most smallholder farmers who dominate Indian
agriculture. Farmers with 1 ha or less in India has increased from 69% to 75% of the total
landholdings between 2002-3 and 2012-13, despite only increasing their share of total land
owned from 23% to 29% in this period. This indicates that the vast majority of farmers in India
are cultivating smaller landholdings over time despite increasing in absolute numbers (NSSO,
2014a). It also means that the growing rural workforce are not being absorbed into urban sectors
fast enough, so many farmers remain in agriculture as a form of disguised unemployment due
to the unremunerative returns (Carlson, 2018). In India, between 1993-4 and 2017-18, absolute
numbers employed in agriculture dropped from 236m to 205m, whereas the total numbers in
non-agricultural sectors (manufacturing, service sectors) increased from 133m to 260m in the
same period. Agriculture in this time span dropped from 64% to 44% in the share in
employment and 30% to 12% of the national income (Mehrotra and Parida, 2019; Kannan,
2020).
76
The failure to realise the gains from agriculture has forced farmers to rely on non-farm
livelihoods. Foster and Rosenzweig (2004) found the share of non-farm incomes in rural India
increased from 19% to 48% between 1971 and 1999, rising to 65% of rural household incomes
today (Chand et al, 2017). Such is the importance of non-farm income for rural households that
25% of India’s smallholders would fall under the poverty line if not for non-farm incomes
(Rahman and Mishra, 2019).
A key non-farm livelihood has been construction work. Rapid urbanisation has created demand
for real estate and infrastructural projects in India since the 1990s (Jose Thomas, 2020). Jobs
in construction increased from 25.6 million in 2004-5 to 58.9 million in 2017-18, becoming
the second largest occupational category in rural areas outside of agriculture (Dhanagare, 2016;
Mehrotra and Parida, 2019). In addition, often unremunerative returns from farming have also
motivated farmers to educate their children and not follow them into agriculture as a future
livelihood (Agarwal and Agrawal, 2017). For farmers and younger educated generations of
rural households, this desire for social mobility has triggered an intergenerational occupational
shift out of agriculture. With some exceptions (Jakimow, 2014), few in the literature have
explored these changes within rural households. Chapter 6 addresses this by exploring the
aspirations for social mobility from farmers for their children to leave agriculture and the
impact it has on rural livelihoods.
For millions of rural households in India, education offers the best avenue out of marginality
and poverty in agriculture via the non-farm labour market (Jakimow, 2016). This is reflected
by the increase in absolute numbers of youth entering education in India from 56.8 million in
2004-5 to 127 million in 2017-18 (Mehrotra and Parida, 2019). In the last decade however,
despite increasing educational attainment, economic growth in India has not created enough
non-farm formal jobs to meet the increasing numbers of educated rural youth entering the job
market. Moreover, most opportunities available in the non-farm sector have been informal,
casual, low paid and low skilled.
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2.3.9 The political economy of the “lost decade” in India and its consequences for rural
livelihoods
Since the 2008 financial crisis, India has faced an acute non-farm labour market stagnation
(Mehra, 2019). The inability of capital to absorb surplus labour from agriculture and create
decent work in cities leaves many in rural India to become what Breman (1994: p1) terms as
“wage hunters and gatherers”. This has had reverberations for farmers and educated rural youth
alike, as it has eroded the safety net expected from non-farm livelihoods. Non-farm job creation
since liberalisation in the 1990s has largely been informal, characterised by low pay, insecure
tenure, and casual labour conditions. Since 1991, 92% of the 61 million jobs in India in the
non-farm sector have been informal (India Spend, 2019). Kannan (2020) describes the nature of
wage labour shifts from agriculture to non-agriculture to be largely horizontal in terms of social
mobility, with work being slightly better paid but still insecure and informal in cities and non-farm
work. Exiting agriculture may not produce better outcomes as Breman (2009: p29) describes
much wage labour opportunities found in Indian cities are often:
“informal labour, characterized by casualized and fluctuating employment
and piece-‐rates, whether working at home, in sweatshops, or on their own
account in the open air; and in the absence of any contractual or labour rights,
or collective organization. In a haphazard fashion, still little understood,
work of this nature has come to predominate within the global labour force
at large.”
Much of India’s rapid growth in the non-farm sector has generated jobs, but not necessarily
desirable ones. The diversification into non-farm livelihoods therefore has presented farmers
with a new form of insecurity, rather than improving overall conditions. The occupational
diversity has involved a further subsumption into the capitalist process, working harder and in
more occupations but with progressively greater income insecurity (Lerche and Shah, 2018).
Macroeconomic trends since the 2010s has seen a shrinking workforce, slowdown in job
creation in all non-farm sectors and rising youth unemployment in the labour market (Mehrotra
and Parida, 2019; Jose Thomas, 2020). Himanshu (2019) finds that wages in non-agricultural
labour and construction only grew at 0.23% and 0.02% per year between 2014 and 2018,
indicating slow income growth.
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This period saw the potential non-farm job seeking workforce increase from 14 million a year
from 2005-12 to 17.5 million a year between 2012-18, but job creation in construction, services
and industry declined from 6.3 million a year between 2005-12 to 4.5 million a year from 2012-
18 (Jose Thomas, 2020). The biggest losers from this economic slowdown have been rural
youth.
The young and rural population of India have faced the brunt of this slowdown, unable to fulfil
their aspirations of securing a job to match their educational qualifications and skills in the
labour market (Aga, 2019). Youth unemployment in India has increased sharply from 5% in
2011-12 to 17% in 2017-18 (Kaul, 2019), an almost 4x increase in absolute terms from 6.7
million to 21.1 million. Inadequate job creation, slowing wage growth and the largely
undesirable nature of jobs in the non-farm sector have stymied the expectations and desires of
educated youth jobseekers in the labour market (Reddy, 2020a). In particular, the numbers of
youth that are classified as not in education, employment, or training (NEET) has increased
sharply from 69 million to 100 million between 2004-18, signifying that rural youth are pulling
out of the labour market altogether, unsatisfied at the available job prospects (Mehrotra and
Parida, 2019).
The dual impact of agricultural and non-farm stagnation for rural household incomes however
has not been discussed in the literature. In Chapter 6, I link the farm to the non-farm.
Smallholder farmers’ educational investments in their children’s education has not paid off,
nor have their agricultural investments in the Liberalised Green Revolution. I show how the
inadequacy of non-farm incomes to make up for losses in agriculture have forced rural
households to engage in risky strategies such as asset sales, doubling down on Bt cotton and
loan stacking in a desperate attempt to earn short term cash. I demonstrate that these strategies
only undermine their economic position further as they run the risk of eroding their asset base
and increasing their indebtedness as economic and environmental risk of intensification
remain. This links the consequences of the Liberalised Green Revolution and non-farm
livelihood stagnation because of the wider political economy of the labour market in India.
The emergence of the non-farm sector in India has provided rural households with crucial
income diversification options in the face of agricultural marginality. More importantly,
younger generations within rural households have attempted to transition to non-farm
livelihoods permanently via education, which is shared by their farmer parents. However, the
nature of non-farm job creation since liberalisation has largely been informal, casualised and
79
low wage daily labour, with limited social protection guarantees and job benefits. In many
cases therefore, non-farm incomes are sought out of desperation for rural households, rather
than the jobs being better financially. Macroeconomic trends in the last decade moreover have
stalled job creation in the non-farm sector, seeing an absolute decline in the number of jobs
available and slowing wage growth. The non-farm sector is increasingly unable to meet the job
demand by educated rural youth, creating a large swathe of disaffected young and educated
rural jobseekers.
Neither agriculture nor non-farm sector in rural India today offer a route to prosperity, rather
simply keep rural households out of poverty. These conditions in the non-farm sector have
vastly increased the underemployment, unemployment and shrinking of the labour market
altogether, with rural youth in particular worst hit and choosing to drop out of the labour
market. The last decade in India has not only continued the problems of Liberalised Green
Revolution in agriculture, but has also burdened farmers and younger generations with non-
farm precarity outside of agriculture. Through surveying the literature, this section has also
identified a number of gaps to be explored in Chapter 6.
2.4 Conclusion
This chapter first introduced the concept of the Liberalised Green Revolution, a new epoch of
the Green Revolution under conditions of economic liberalisation since the 1980s. The
assumption of the Liberalised Green Revolution was that market integration of smallholder
farmers in marginal settings would increase agricultural growth and kick start the structural
transformation of the economy. However, this assumption was complicated and nuanced by
the political economy factors of the intersection between the unsuitable environmental and
economic risk context of capital and input intensive crops in marginal regions that smallholder
farmers financed with informal credit. This was combined with the self-interest of private
intermediaries to spread technologies to unsuitable agroecological areas and the entwining of
unequal debt relations between intermediaries and smallholders, worsening environmental risk
and indebtedness for the latter. Finally, the role of the government as a facilitator of markets
and politically expedient intervener in electricity subsidies in the Liberalised Green Revolution
often saw unrealised gains from agricultural intensification and dependence on non-farm
livelihoods to survive.
Next, the chapter explored the Liberalised Green Revolution in India, studying Bt cotton and
tubewell irrigation technologies. Bt cotton, a GM crop imported to India by US agribusiness
80
giant Monsanto, was marketed and sold by local level private seed firms to subsistence
smallholder farmers in rainfed and poor soil settings. The unregulated nature of the cotton seed
market and absence of the government saw private input firms lead the push for the adoption
of Bt cotton, a high market price but capital, water and input intensive crop, financed by high
interest informal credit. This maximised Bt cotton adoption at the cost of indebtedness and
failed returns on investments for smallholder farmers as growing Bt cotton in marginal regions
exacerbated harvest failure risks for farmers via monsoon variability. The literature on Bt
cotton also revealed gaps for this thesis to address in Chapter 4 through the fieldwork case
study in Telangana.
Tubewell irrigation in the Liberalised Green Revolution had a similar story to Bt cotton.
Tubewell irrigation expanded via a private sector decentralised market competition, as private
irrigation firms maximised smallholder adoption in semi-arid and hard rock areas. These areas
were prone to erratic rainfall and poor aquifer storage. The desire to grow cash crops and repay
capital investments pushed farmers to competitively drill for accessing finite groundwater in
aquifers. This was also accelerated through populist policy incentives from the government,
increasing tubewell exploitation in adverse ecological semi-arid and hard rock environment.
Risk and indebtedness soon rose as farmers overexploited aquifers to failure amidst worsening
monsoons and deepening groundwater tables. In addition, the literature on tubewell irrigation
identified underexplored areas to address in Chapter 5, where I explore the political economy
of tubewell irrigation in the case study of Telangana.
Despite the deeper integration into markets and the access to agricultural technologies in the
Liberalised Green Revolution, farmers in India now rely more on non-farm incomes as a
primary income, educating their children in a bid for them to escape agriculture permanently.
Most non-farm work available in India however has been low paid, insecure, and insufficient
for rural households to repay debts from agriculture and sustain the household. Moreover, since
the financial crisis in India in 2008, non-farm income growth and job creation slowed down
rapidly, exacerbated rural youth unemployment and underemployment. Facing marginality in
agriculture and outside of it, this paints a bleak picture for India’s rural livelihoods. The chapter
also revealed gaps in the non-farm literature, to be addressed in Chapter 6 of the thesis where
I look at the impact of the Liberalised Green Revolution on future farm livelihoods. The next
chapter will provide the methodological plan and background to the case study state of
Telangana, setting it up for the empirical chapters 4, 5 and 6.
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Chapter 3 – Methodology
3.1 Introduction
Chapter 2 explored the theoretical framework and literature review for the thesis. I introduced
the concept of the Liberalised Green Revolution, a new epoch of the Green Revolution that
came out of liberalisation policies since the 1980s in developing countries including India. The
Liberalised Green Revolution saw private intermediaries such as informal moneylenders, input
and irrigation firms replace the public sector in seeds, inputs, irrigation, credit, and extension
services. Private firms competed to promote agricultural intensification, targeting subsistence
farmers in marginal environments. Widespread informal credit availability at flexible terms
made it possible for smallholder farmers to convert their farms to commercial agriculture.
Chapter 2 applied the Liberalised Green Revolution to the case study of Bt cotton and tubewell
irrigation in India, key technologies that drove smallholder intensification in the 1990s.
Smallholder adoption in the Liberalised Green Revolution drove India to become the world’s
largest Bt cotton grower and groundwater user. However, Chapter 2 revealed that the political
economy conditions of technology adoption in marginal smallholder settings often caused
indebtedness and resource degradation as areas were not suited to prolonged agricultural
intensification. With diminishing returns from agriculture, farmers now rely on non-farm
incomes to survive, themselves low paid and informal.
This chapter discusses the methodology used to collect fieldwork data in the case study state
of Telangana. The thesis utilised a mixed methods case study based ethnographic fieldwork
approach consisting of 84 interviews and 151 household surveys. The data was collected over
an 8-month period split into two phases. The first was a one-month scoping phase in August
2018 and the second the seven-month fieldwork phase between January and July 2019. The
main fieldwork was conducted in the village of Kacharam, Nalgonda district, in the south
Indian state of Telangana. Kacharam is a typical semi-arid and hard rock aquifer village in
Telangana dominated by smallholder farmers growing monocrop Bt cotton and tubewells,
transitioning from subsistence crops in the 2000s. The village reflected cropping and irrigation
dynamics at the district level as 49% of the total cropped area was made up of Bt cotton (DES
India, 2019b), 59% of the irrigated area used by tubewells, and 85% of farmers owned less than
1 hectare (DES India, 2019a; 2019b). Thereby, Kacharam is a salient case study and microcosm
of the widespread adoption of Bt cotton and tubewells and smallholder agricultural
intensification in the Liberalised Green Revolution.
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This methodology chapter will be structured as follows. The chapter is divided into three main
sections. The first section justifies the choice of Telangana and the village site of Kacharam for
study for the thesis. The second section presents the methods used and describes the process of
data collection and analysis during fieldwork. The third section offers a reflection of the
fieldwork experience including some of the ethical challenges and lessons learnt.
3.2 Fieldwork preparation and site selection
All research was carried out in the south Indian state of Telangana, a newly created state in
2014 and formerly part of Andhra Pradesh (Benbabaali, 2016). The choice of Telangana for
the thesis was influenced by three main factors: location (rural and rainfed), process (a region
where smallholder agricultural intensification occurred during the Liberalised Green
Revolution) and that it is a primarily agrarian economy. In part due to smallholder adoption,
Bt cotton in Telangana is the single biggest crop by area at 32%, with tubewell irrigation
making up 51% of total irrigated area and the average landholding at 1.2ha (DES India, 2019a;
2019b). This has made Telangana the third largest Bt cotton and fifth highest tubewell state by
area in India by 2019 (DES India, 2018; 2019b; Kranthi and Stone, 2020). Reflecting the
adoption of high capital-intensive technologies, Telangana also has the second highest rural
indebtedness rate in India, with 89% of mostly small and marginal farmers indebted to loans,
and with debts at 6x their asset values (NSSO, 2013a).
Telangana was selected as it was a region at the forefront of economic liberalisation in India in
the 1990s (Posani, 2009). Agricultural intensification took place in an agroecologically and
economically underdeveloped state dominated by subsistence farmers. It has a semi-arid
climate characterised by erratic monsoons and frequent droughts, while also featuring low
fertile laterite red soils which have poor water storage and infiltration capacity (CGWB Andhra
Pradesh, 2013). Hydrogeologically, most of Telangana is comprised of hard rock aquifers,
which makes it expensive to drill for groundwater irrigation, and has low aquifer storage
capacity, deemed unsuitable for intensive groundwater development as early as the 1960s (Rao,
2014).
Within Telangana, I chose Nalgonda district, a remote semi-arid and hard rock aquifer frontier
district. Within two decades of the 1990s, the district transformed from a subsistence cropping
system to a commercialised Bt cotton and groundwater intensive system, which occupied 49%
and 59% of the cultivated and irrigated areas respectively as of 2019 (DES India, 2019a;
2019b). This was important for the thesis as it allowed me to examine how and why the
83
Liberalised Green Revolution proceeded as quickly as it did and what the ramifications were
for smallholder farmer risk and debt.
Despite the specific characteristics of Telangana and Nalgonda, the findings from the fieldwork
matter beyond the Indian context. For instance, the rapid uptake of Bt cotton is a microcosm
of the spread of genetically modified technologies in developing countries, as over 24
developing countries globally grow GM crops, by 17 million farmers (ISAAA, 2019). This is
representative of private sector efforts to modernise agriculture in smallholder contexts in
developing countries, for example explicit attempts to institute a new “African Green
Revolution” in the past decade (Moseley et al, 2017). Studying an agriculturally
underdeveloped region as I do in the thesis therefore can help shed light as to how the process
of agricultural intensification occurs and the consequences of it. Moreover, the marginal
growing environment present in Telangana and Nalgonda represents the dynamic of rainfed
and semi-arid agricultural regions of the world. This helps shed light on why agricultural
commercialisation can increase economic risks in the long run if implemented in unsuitable
agricultural settings (Pingali, 2012). The key points this thesis emphasises however is how the
local political economy context and social differentiation intersects with the agroecological
features of a given region to determine its long-term agricultural outcomes.
Finally, the choice of studying a village using a long-term ethnographic approach for
understanding agricultural political economy is the following. As Harriss-White and Harriss
(2007: p16) argue, village studies “can be used (critically or not) to exemplify economic,
political, sociological and cultural processes”. Observing variances and social differentiation
at individual village settings can help critique and inform theory (ibid). Village studies can help
locally situate economic policies and macro trends in agriculture, for example Bt cotton and
tubewell irrigation adoption within the everyday context of how farmers interact with the
technologies. Rigg et al (2012) therefore posit that understanding rural life requires both large
scale and statistically representative household surveys and long term intensive ethnographic
fieldwork case studies to observe agrarian change. In the Indian context, the village remains a
focal point and unit of analysis, as almost 70% of the population still live in rural areas today
and 43% work in agriculture (DES India, 2018).
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3.3 Scoping study
The first stage of the fieldwork was a scoping study. This took place in August 2018 in
Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana, and Kattangoor, a village in Nalgonda district in
south Telangana. I first carried out eight interviews with academics and NGOs in Hyderabad
to discuss groundwater irrigation, Bt cotton, and agrarian change in Telangana. They gave their
own fieldwork reflections on these topics as well as discussing agriculture and irrigation policy
in the state. These interviews were my entry into fieldwork as it gave a background context of
the agrarian setting in Telangana. Furthermore, these preliminary interviews helped me
navigate the logistics for the fieldwork as I gained contacts for research assistants in Nalgonda
district which would prove invaluable for the main fieldwork phase in 2019.
After these initial interviews in Hyderabad, I spent three weeks conducting fieldwork in
Kattangoor, a village 15km from Nalgonda city, the capital of Nalgonda district. The village
was chosen through snowball sampling via research assistants and NGO contacts. Snowball
sampling was chosen as it has the advantage of locating hard to reach populations (Heckathorn,
2011), in my case for carrying out long term ethnographic fieldwork in remote and marginal
villages in Telangana. In Kattangoor village, I conducted ten interviews with farmers across
different castes, classes, religions, and genders. My scoping study fieldwork in Kattangoor
gave me a testing ground for my interview questions. These questions were the draft template
for my final interview questions for the main fieldwork phase. I collected empirical data on Bt
cotton cropping patterns, tubewell access and informal credit relations, all features of the
Liberalised Green Revolution. The findings were checked informally against Kacharam to see
if patterns could be observed across villages. In all, I collected 18 interviews in the scoping
study, which were used for Chapters 4-6 as empirical material.
3.4 Main fieldwork phase
In January 2019 in preparation of the main fieldwork phase, I next began the selection of the
district and village. I continued with Nalgonda district as I had already developed contacts with
NGOs and research assistants in the scoping phase. I recruited a research assistant who worked
for a local NGO in Devarakonda based on scoping contacts, a town in Nalgonda district, so
Devarakonda was chosen as a base. We chose a village nearby for the fieldwork site taking
account of the following.
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First, the village had to be roughly representative of rural Nalgonda with regards to cropping
patterns, climate, and hydrogeological characteristics. This was to fit the purpose of the
research to study tubewell irrigation and Bt cotton in semi-arid and hard rock aquifer regions,
the dominant crop, climate, aquifer, and irrigation type respectively in Nalgonda and
Telangana. The village also had to have a cross section of castes and classes of farmers like in
Nalgonda and Telangana, where lower caste Other Backward Castes (OBCs), Scheduled Castes
(SCs) and Scheduled Tribes (STs) made up 90% of the population as did smallholder farmers
(Benbabaali, 2016). These castes have the lowest landholding sizes, literacy rates and rural
household incomes on average in rural India relative to higher classes and castes (Himanshu et
al, 2016). I also used the latest district level census figures from 2011 for rural Nalgonda to
compare with the village census data to make sure the village was generally representative.
Next, the village had to be outside a command area of canal irrigation, to study the effects of
groundwater irrigation alone, which makes up 85% of Telangana’s irrigated area. These socio-
economic, climate, aquifer and cropping criteria for a village in Telangana acted as a
microcosm for wider trends of smallholder intensification of the Liberalised Green Revolution.
3.4.1 Village profile
With the above criteria in mind, I chose Kacharam. It is located 15km from the town of
Devarakonda in Nalgonda District in South Telangana, 63km south from Nalgonda city, the
district headquarters and 110km from Hyderabad, the state capital. The village location is
shown below.
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Figure 7 - Map of Telangana
Source: Wikipedia (2021)
Telangana
87
Figure 8 - Nalgonda District
Sub district map showing
Devarakonda mandal (sub
district) where Kacharam is
located
Source: DES Telangana (2019)
Nalgonda District
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Figure 9 - Kacharam
Source: Google Maps (2019)
Figure 10 - Kacharam Village Map - New OBC Colony
Source: Google Maps (2019)
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Figure 11 - Kacharam Village Map - Main OBC and SC colony
Source: Google Maps (2019)
Figure 12 - Kacharam Village Map - ST colony
Source: Google Maps (2019)
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Geographically, the village is split into three sections according to caste. The first part of the
village off the main road into Kacharam are 10 newly built households inhabited by the Goud
and Golla sub castes from the Other Backward Castes (OBC), who form the dominant caste
group in the village. Traditionally Gouds engaged in palm wine makers and Gollas in
shepherding goat and sheep alongside farming. In the main part of the village are Golla OBCs
and Scheduled Castes/Dalits (SCs) from the Mala and Madiga sub castes. Malas were
traditionally basket weavers, cobblers, and Madigas worked as bonded agricultural labourers
for higher castes. Caste occupations are largely not practised anymore in the village as most
households engage in agricultural labour or farming on their own land. The exceptions are
Golla and Goud households who rear sheep and goats and sell palm wine for additional income.
Finally, around 2 km from the village lived 10 Scheduled Tribe households (ST) in a traditional
hamlet called a thanda. These were traditionally nomadic and forest dwelling groups that
settled in Kacharam to practise farming. Figure 13 below shows a caste diagram of Telangana
and Figures 14-16 show the different parts of Kacharam village.
Figure 13 - Caste Diagram of Telangana
Source: Srinivasulu (2002), Suri (2002), Vakulabharanam and Motiram (2014), Prasad (2015),
Times of India (2019).
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Figure 14 - OBC Colony
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Figure 15 - SC Colony
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
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Figure 16 - ST Colony
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Kacharam sits at an altitude of 224m. It is 1km from the nearest public bus route and has a
government primary school in the village. Kacharam gained its village status in January 2019,
when the newly elected person became the first ever Sarpanch (village leader), representing
the Telangana Rashtra Samiti (TRS), the incumbent political party ruling Telangana.
Previously it came under the jurisdiction of Kondabheemanapalle, a village 7km away. The
houses are mostly pucca (cement and brick) and received piped drinking water supplies under
the Mission Bhageeratha scheme in 2018, a TRS state government initiative to provide free
piped drinking water to villages in Telangana. Groundwater is also used for drinking from open
wells and hand pumps. The village was electrified 20 years ago and receives mobile coverage.
The village also has three corner shops, a government school nutrition programme centre
(Anganwadi) and a village government office (Gram Panchayat).
Occupations wise, older generations of farmers (40+) mostly work in agriculture in the
monsoon season from June to October. In the dry season for the remaining year, farmers work
as agricultural labourers in nearby villages and in construction work in Devarakonda, the
nearest town, approximately 15km away. Both male and female older generations farm in the
monsoon and in the dry season females work predominantly in agricultural labour and males
in construction labour. Younger generations of rural households work in Devarakonda town in
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non-farm jobs as fertiliser shop assistants or rickshaw drivers. Average household incomes in
Kacharam for 2018 were ~$2100, of which 39% to 70% came from non-farm sources.
The fieldwork took place between January and July, so it covered both the rabi (dry season)
and kharif (monsoon season). This was important so I could see how farmers negotiated an
entire farming calendar year, covering both Bt cotton in the monsoon and tubewell irrigated
rice in the dry season, as shown in Chapters 4 and 5 of the thesis. In addition, in the dry season
I could observe their non-farm livelihoods too, as investigated in Chapter 6. Kacharam has a
semi-arid and drought prone climate, with predominantly hot and dry weather and 69% of
annual rainfall falling in the monsoon between June and October. The village received
approximately 505mm of rain during the monsoon in 2019, slightly higher than Nalgonda
district average of 474mm but much lower than the Telangana average of 791mm (CGWB
Telangana, 2019). Kacharam is in the south Telangana agro-climatic zone, which has lower
rainfall, and is hotter and drier than other regions in the state at up to 50C in the summer (DES
Telangana, 2016). Kacharam features predominantly red laterite and sandy soils, with red soils
making up 85% of the soils in the state (CGWB Andhra Pradesh, 2019). Red laterite soils have
low fertility, low storage, low infiltration capacity and high runoff rates in comparison to sandy
and black alluvial soils (Gine et al, 2008).
Figure 17 - Dried Up Bt Cotton Under Red Laterite Soils in Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
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Kacharam also features hard rock aquifers, made up of granite, gneiss, and limestone (CGWB
Telangana, 2017). Groundwater is found within fractures and weathered regions in the rock at
15-20m depths but can be found as deep as 80m (CGWB Andhra Pradesh, 2013). Hard rock
aquifers cover 66% of India’s aquifer area, making them the dominant aquifer type (Mukherjee,
2018). Sourcing groundwater in hard rock aquifers is highly variable, prone to climatic change,
shallow aquifer storage capacity, erratic monsoon recharge and expensive due to the density of
the rock relative to alluvial aquifers (Shah, 2010; Blakesee et al, 2020).
Figure 18 - Tubewell Irrigation in Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
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Figure 19 - Decadal Groundwater Levels in Telangana, 2006-2015
Source: CGWB Telangana (2017)
Figure 19 from the CGWB in Telangana (2017), the main groundwater state government level
authority, revealed that groundwater levels decreased by 0-2m in the monsoon period in 2015
relative to 2006, indicating dropping groundwater levels in the region and Kacharam. Rajan et
al (2020) moreover reveal that Nalgonda is one of the 27 most exploited groundwater districts
in India and Telangana is one of the 9 most overexploited states in India.
The choice of Kacharam as a village and Telangana as a case study is useful beyond the Indian
context as it expresses how the most marginal rural areas adapt to scarce resources and
groundwater depletion under an adverse climatic setting. Groundwater depletion is a major
problem in other semi-arid and arid regions such as in the Middle East (Al Naber and Molle,
2017) where farmers face similar agroecological and groundwater constraints as the case study
in Telangana.
Nalgonda District
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In addition, Telangana has faced droughts in at least one region for 23 out of the last 30 years
(DES Telangana, 2016). This is an important factor in explaining Bt cotton yields under rainfed
conditions in Chapter 4, aquifer depletion in Chapter 5 due to erratic rainfall recharge and shift
in the nature and pattern of livelihoods away from agriculture in Chapter 6 of this thesis.
Finally, Kumar et al (2018) in Figure 20 have also identified Nalgonda district as very high on
the climate exposure index, based on interviews in rural Telangana, and data on temperature
changes, heat & cold wave events, rainfall variability, and changes in the frequency or intensity
of consecutive dry and wet days. This indicates that Kacharam is an agroecologically and
hydrogeologically fragile environment.
Figure 20 - Climate Vulnerability Index Telangana
Source: Kumar et al (2018)
The case study for this thesis helps unveil how farmers address semi-arid and drought prone
conditions in India, with 33% of the country located in these areas (Todmal, 2019). Beyond
India, semi-arid regions constitute 10% of the global agricultural area, home to 2.5 billion
people who rely on drylands for agriculture and rearing livestock (Stewart, 2016). Dryland
areas are also set to increase by 10% by 2050 due to climatic change affecting rainfall
variability (Li et al, 2020). Hence examining how smallholder farmers in Telangana manage
Nalgonda
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resources in marginal conditions and adapt to a worsening climate can provide lessons beyond
the Indian context.
Finally, the table below shows background socio economic statistics for the village based on
household surveys I conducted. It reveals high rates of illiteracy, low land sizes and below
poverty per capita income per day. OBCs are the dominant caste group in the village, with the
village leader coming from an OBC caste and as well as the largest landholder. The low literacy
rates, caste breakdown and average landholdings track with census data at the district and state
level, so the village is representative of an average village in the region.
Table 2 - Socio-economic Profile of Kacharam
Category Total
Total Population 630
Total Households 151
Adult Literacy Rate (%) 35
Adult Literacy Rate Male (%) 39
Adult Literacy Rate Female (%) 29
Average Household Size 4
Per Capita Income Per Day ($) 1.20
Farming Households 105
Non-Farm Households 46
SC Households 38
ST Households 23
OBC Households 88
Muslim Households 2
Total Land Area (Acres) 443
Gross Cropped Area (Acres) 369
Average Landholding Size (Acres) 3.5
Average Age of Household Head 47
Landless Households 16
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
This section will explain data collection methods used in the fieldwork.
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3.5 Using ethnography in a mixed method frame to investigate agrarian change
This thesis utilises an ethnographic fieldwork in a mixed method frame to investigate agrarian
change in India. Ethnography is a branch of qualitative research that assumes that knowledge
is socially constructed (Creswell, 2007). Ethnography generates a complex multiplicity of
understandings, meanings, and relations from participants through long term data fieldwork
(Guba and Lincoln, 1994). Fieldwork in Kacharam took place over 7 months of repeated
encounters with farmers to ensure data validity as it unveiled and refined my interpretations of
change over time in the field and in the participants’ lives.
This is because from aggregate figures, Bt cotton, tubewell growth in agriculture in Telangana
and India have rapidly increased through smallholder adoption in the Liberalised Green
Revolution, implying that market integration has been successful. However, these quantitative
assessments miss farmer perspectives of the rapid transformation from subsistence to
commercial agriculture and its impacts on indebtedness, risk, and farming knowledge. In a
political economy and agroecological context such as Telangana, ethnography is of analytical
importance in understanding the processes, mechanisms and factors underlying agrarian
change and the socially differentiated outcomes from it (Harriss, 2011).
I used an ethnographic frame with mixed methods for the thesis, consisting of quantitative
household surveys and qualitative interviews. Relying on quantitative approaches alone
abstracts problems to a collective, missing nuance and socially differentiated household context
of class, caste, or gender. In addition, relying entirely on qualitative data from a small sample
of interviewees would not be suitable for quantifying general trends at the village level or for
extracting descriptive data. For this reason, I used household surveys that covered 98% of the
village population sample to summarise observations from the village and the Liberalised
Green Revolution. I then used quotes to provide a thick description, defined as the:
“process of paying attention to contextual detail in observing and interpreting social
meaning…thick description involves looking at the rich details of the case, sorting out
the complex layers of understanding that structure the social world” (Dawson, 2010:
p942-944).
This provided a longitudinal account of an individual farmer’s experiences of harvest failure
or groundwater depletion for example. This gave me a combination of the strengths of both
qualitative and quantitative data for providing a narrative of agrarian change for Kacharam.
This also ensured data triangulation and reliability as I could corroborate my findings with
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different data sources in the fieldwork and with secondary data from aggregate data and
agrarian change fieldwork in Telangana.
Finally, a key part of ethnography is to account for the positionality of the researcher and the
power relations between researcher/participant. In relation to agrarian change research in India,
this includes assumptions during the analysis of fieldwork data, power relations in the field,
and bias of the researcher via class, religion, and gender dynamics (Watson, 2013).
Positionality will be explored in greater detail in the next section.
3.6 Positionality
My positionality as a male, Telangana born, urban, upper caste Brahmin from a middle-class
background is important to state considering the motivations behind the research. This affected
positionality during fieldwork, as in Telangana, low caste, and class OBC, ST and SCs make
up 90% of the population (Benbabaali, 2016). Skelton (2001: p89) defines positionality as:
“our race and gender, but also our class experiences, our levels of education, our
sexuality, our age…all of these have a bearing upon who we are, how our identities are
formed and how we do our research”.
Although Indian, I am what Mohammad (2001) calls “an indigenous insider”, where I lie in
between a local and a foreigner due to my Indian ethnicity and background but different class
and cultural upbringing in the UK. My caste background is easily identifiable by my surname
and imbued with social status and privilege, especially in rural India where caste forms the
social structure of a village (Himanshu et al, 2016).
In Kacharam however, my caste and UK identity were not of importance relative to my class.
Due to my proficiency in Telugu while talking to villagers, my caste identity and background
was assumed to be an urban, educate elite from Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana, and
not as a foreigner. However, my class identity had implications during the fieldwork as farmers
frequently expected compensation for participating in interviews. I made it clear to the villagers
that I cannot offer money as I was a PhD student, even though the endless patience and interest
many villagers showed in the research process made my research possible. However, to give
back in a small way, I plan to return to Kacharam after the PhD and disseminate an executive
summary of the thesis with policy recommendations for the village.
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A key way in which access and positionality in the village were made easier was through the
village leader and local research assistants enabling familiarity with the villagers, especially in
my interactions with women. Rural India is socially conservative with regards to interactions
between unmarried male strangers and women (Nilotpal, 2011). This issue was greatly
mitigated through employing a female research assistant from the village while conducting the
household surveys. In fact, 35 out of 65 interviews (54%) were conducted with women, so the
previous concerns of my positionality as a male in a conservative village setting were resolved
in the interview phase. Women were much more forthcoming and comfortable as we sequenced
the research to start with surveys with local research assistants before interviews by myself and
my research assistant.
The next section details the data collection process.
3.7 Methods and techniques used in data collection
This section discusses the process of fieldwork data collection for the thesis in Telangana. The
fieldwork consisted of a mixed methods case study-based approach utilising 151 quantitative
household surveys in the fieldwork village of Kacharam and 84 semi structured qualitative
interviews with farmers in Kacharam, tubewell firms and input firms in Devarakonda and
Mallepally (towns close to Kacharam) and academics, and NGOs in Hyderabad. The section
provides a summary of the methods and data pertaining to each research question before going
into the fieldwork data collection process.
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3.7.1 Data collection summary
The thesis outlines the three research questions below and how I collected the data using
interviews, household surveys and secondary data to answer them.
Table 3 - Data Collection Summary
Research Question Data Collected Methods Used
1) What are the consequences
of cotton farming in the
Liberalised Green
Revolution in Telangana?
Bt cotton debt, long term
yields, extension advice, input
costs, rainfall patterns, farmer
knowledge on Bt cotton
cultivation, Bt cotton political
economy conditions
84 Semi structured interviews
with farmers, input dealers,
academics, NGOs
151 Household surveys with
farmers in Kacharam
Secondary government
statistics on cotton,
ethnographic fieldwork on Bt
cotton in Telangana
2) How has tubewell
irrigation changed the
political economy of
agriculture in Telangana?
Tubewell debt, well depth,
total wells drilled, wells
working, wells failed, drilling
costs, extension advice,
cropping patterns, rainfall
patterns, aquifer conditions,
political economy conditions
84 Semi structured interviews
with farmers, academics,
NGOs, tubewell firms
151 Household surveys with
farmers in Kacharam
Secondary government
statistics, ethnographic
fieldwork on tubewell
irrigation in Telangana
3) What are the implications
of the Liberalised Green
Revolution for the future
of agricultural livelihoods
in Telangana?
Non-farm incomes, total
household incomes vs debt and
expenses, farmer debt
repayment strategies,
intergenerational aspirations,
education, future livelihoods
for rural youth
84 Semi structured interviews
with farmers
151 Household surveys with
farmers in Kacharam
Secondary government labour
market data, ethnographic
fieldwork on non-farm
livelihoods in Telangana
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Following this summary of the methods and data collected for the thesis, the next sections will
detail the steps and processes involved in the fieldwork.
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3.7.2 Fieldwork data collection process
The fieldwork consisted of a mixed methods case study-based approach utilising quantitative
household surveys and semi-structured qualitative interviews. This phase utilised a snowball
sampling approach to recruit participants through contacts with NGOs and local research
assistants and at the village level. Snowball sampling was a practical necessity as the
participants were hard to reach in remote rural villages in Telangana and therefore not able to
pre-arrange or contact prior to the fieldwork. In addition, case studies help investigate in depth
in a delimited context (e.g., a geographic area or population) how or why a particular issue or
process occurs and applies a multidimensional perspective in understanding it (Baxter and
Jack, 2008). The use of multiple sources in the case study helped to paint a picture of agrarian
change in a descriptive quantitative fashion in conjunction with the “thick description” from
ethnographic findings. I will give a summary of the data collected using each of the methods
of household surveys and interviews before going into depth as to how the data was collected.
3.7.3 Fieldwork data summary
Below in Table 4 I summarise the data collected for household surveys and interviews in the
fieldwork:
Table 4 - Fieldwork Data Summary
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Interview Data Summary Household Survey Data Summary
Thematic Round 1 - I covered livelihood strategies, inputs, cropping
patterns, intergenerational changes in farming, and monsoon
patterns.
Part 1 - The first half of the survey
collected GPS data, yields, input and
expenditure costs, cropping patterns, land
use, annual household incomes, opinion
surveys on climate and groundwater and
debt levels.
Thematic Round 2 - I focused on credit, debt, incomes and how they
manage debt repayments for irrigation and farming costs. From the
household survey I could already build an income and consumption
profile so the interview questions were the farmers’ own strategies,
worries and aspirations for their household economic security and
farming future.
Part 2 - The second half of the survey
focused on irrigation investment costs, well
depths, credit sources, interest, well failure
rates, groundwater depletion coping
strategies, as well as welfare policies that
the household benefited from.
Thematic Round 3 – I focused on groundwater irrigation investment
decisions, cropping pattern shifts, groundwater depletion and future
livelihoods for rural youth. I carried out the irrigation round in July
during the monsoon season to observe changes in cropping patterns
and irrigation use compared to the survey period in January/February
and the monsoon season from 2018.
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3.7.4 Household surveys
The fieldwork in Kacharam was split into two phases: 151 household surveys, followed by 73
interviews. The household surveys recorded detailed information (as outlined in Table 4 above)
for 98% of the village population, useful for descriptive data in conjunction with interview
quotes. Two research assistants were hired from the village for the surveys upon
recommendation from the village leader. We conducted the household surveys on every
weekday over a two-month period in February and March. For the first week of surveys, I
conducted enumerator training with the research assistants. The data was collected on paper
surveys after consent forms and information sheets in Telugu were handed out to the
households or verbally agreed upon via audio recording prior to the survey commencing. The
survey data was then uploaded at the end of each day onto an Excel spreadsheet. We revisited
some households at the end of the survey period to follow up on missing data or any errors we
made. On average the surveys lasted one to two hours per household.
The household surveys gave in depth household profiles of the entire village at a coverage rate
of 98%, or 151 out of 155 households, so findings could be generalised at a village level. We
could not cover the remaining 2% as two households refused to participate, one elderly
widower household passed away after the household survey and one household permanently
migrated. They covered the recall for the agricultural year 2018 so we could compare monsoon,
cropping patterns and groundwater irrigation with the 2019 season.
The next phase of the research was semi-structured interviews, for which I used a purposive
sampling technique to recruit interviewees. Purposive sampling was the chosen strategy as I
aimed to interview a cross section of households in relation to Bt cotton and tubewells. I
achieved a balance of a quantity deemed to be a good sample size at roughly 50% of the village
population, but also practicality of the fieldwork timeframe of seven months (Nilotpal, 2011).
The interview criteria and justifications are listed below in Table 5.
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3.7.5 Interview household selection criteria
Table 5 - Interview Household Selection Criteria
Participant Group Selected Justification
50/50 men and women Gendered differentiation was an important factor
to consider e.g., in intra household decision
making in crop choices, irrigation, household
finances and investment decisions.
ST, SC, OBC castes Important to get a cross section of castes due to
the differentiation in landholding size, assets,
income, and social relations in the village.
Widowed women I could see the intersectional effects of
landholding, caste and gender and the impact it
had on debt, income, and farming outcomes
Successful farmers To study how farmers with higher yields and
incomes compared on groundwater irrigation
management and cropping methods to less
successful farmers.
Multi tubewell drillers Households who drilled multiple times for wells
were likely to be highly indebted due to high
failure rates from their wells, and the
consequences for household economic security.
Currently working tubewells Observing farming outcomes for households
with working irrigation and the effect on debts,
incomes, yields.
Failed tubewells I wanted to study their coping mechanisms from
groundwater depletion, e.g., further tubewell
investments, changes to cropping patterns,
migration or abandoning farming as a primary
livelihood.
Marginal farmers <1 ha
Small farmers 1-2 ha
Medium farmers 2-5 ha
Large farmers >5 ha
A class-based analysis was an important criterion
for comparing yields, incomes, cropping
patterns, irrigation investments, welfare schemes
and credit sources.
Highly indebted farmers >$4000 I chose the figure of $4000 as it was twice the
average income per year for Kacharam’s farmers,
an unsustainable amount due to interest
accumulation and unpredictable farm incomes. It
was also important to examine the source and
cause of indebtedness e.g., farming, marriage, or
health
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
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Based on the criteria above, we selected 65 households, or 42% of the total households in
Kacharam. I chose 65 households as it was a practically achievable target per month balancing
my time, financial resources, data saturation and the farmer availability during the daytime.
We visited each household three times over three months from April to July to cover the three
thematic rounds. In total we spent ninety minutes to two hours interviewing each household.
The reason for spacing out the interviews was that we did not want to fatigue and inconvenience
the farmer by visiting them multiple times per month. We settled on visiting one household
every month for the interview stage as a good balance. The household surveys were analysed
using Excel for descriptive statistics to provide supportive evidence to the interviews and
generalise findings at the village level.
3.7.6 Interviews
The interviews took place between April and July with a week gap in May due to the national
elections held in India. I used semi-structured interviews for the fieldwork. They allowed me
to have a structure of covering the three thematic rounds pertaining to the research questions
and corroborate findings from the literature review on Bt cotton, tubewells and agrarian change
in Telangana (Vakulabharanam, 2004; Stone and Flachs, 2018). In addition, they also gave me
flexibility and freedom to allow pre-planned topics to change if the farmer wanted to discuss a
topic outside of the round. Interviews helped to convey farmers perspectives about Bt cotton
and tubewell irrigation and enhanced the understanding of farmers’ experiences with the
technologies, while also giving a rich narrative of the field setting so the reader can see the
contextual factors of the research.
The interviews were broken into three thematic rounds as listed above in Table 4 and we
completed one round roughly per month over a five-day working week. The interviews took
place between 7am and 10am to suit farmers’ working day in agriculture or wage labour. After
completing information and consent forms, we began the interview. I asked questions and took
notes and the research assistant recorded via a dictaphone. The thematic rounds improved and
expanded on the scoping study structure but kept some of the same order of topics and
questions. In total I interviewed 65 households in Kacharam over the three months and took a
purposive sampling approach in selecting from of the 151 households.
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After the three rounds of interviews with farmers we carried out supplementary interviews with
tubewell firms and input dealers, totalling 11 interviews. These were the key private
intermediary actors in the Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana providing credit,
technology and extension support to farmers for Bt cotton and tubewells. The interviewees
were based in nearby towns to Kacharam such as Devarakonda and Mallepally, and we visited
these during the day after we conducted farmer interviews in the morning. The total number
was only 11 due to the difficulty in gaining consent from interviewees when we approached
them for interview. The interviews took place at their preferred location, so within input or
irrigation shops. These supplementary interviews provided an in-depth discussion with private
sector intermediaries, whose crucial role in the political economy of the Liberalised Green
Revolution had been under explored in the literature.
In total including the scoping and final interview phase I carried out 84 interviews and 151
household surveys for the fieldwork, utilising a majority for the final write up. The interview
recordings were translated and transcribed from Telugu to English. The interviews were then
split thematically into three folders pertaining to each round, which were used to organise the
analysis phase. A list of all interview participants, questions and dates and a detailed summary
of the household surveys can be found in Appendix 1, 3 and 4.
3.8 Data analysis
The next stage of the methodology was data analysis, which this section will justify and outline
in more detail.
Thematic analysis creates themes that emerge from the data in relation to the research
questions. Themes are useful in “bringing together components or fragments of ideas or
experiences, which often are meaningless when viewed alone” (Aronson, 1995: p1). The three
research questions for this thesis were on cotton, tubewell irrigation and non-farm livelihoods,
so I sorted the interview transcripts into the three thematic rounds correspondingly. The
analysis phase required coding the transcripts within each thematic round to find connections
to the literature and original contributions the interview data made to the research questions.
An example of the coded sheet can be found in Appendix 2.
The interview transcripts were coded manually for the thematic analysis as it allowed me to
get to know the data better than NViVo, and I was able to make better connections between the
interview data and the household survey data. Linking back to the literature review topics, the
codes for each thematic round summarised interview responses according to its relation to the
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literature and the research questions. The thematic rounds I selected served as a large enough
umbrella under which various codes could fit under, but also specific enough that each major
idea related to the research question made the theme unique (Attride-Stirling, 2001). This way
I could paint a narrative from the data for the analysis chapters.
3.9 Ethics
Fieldwork is a messy process laden with ethical challenges pertaining to power, representation,
and consent. I took the following steps to mitigate these to the extent possible during the
fieldwork. Prior to engaging in interviews, I conveyed the purpose of the research both written
and verbally in Telugu or English based on the preference of the participant. Given 125 out of
151 household heads (85%) in Kacharam were illiterate, they gave oral consent for the surveys
and interviews. I read out the consent form and information sheet in Telugu for farmers and
market intermediaries, whereas academics and NGO professionals in Hyderabad read and
signed them in English. A copy of the consent form can be found in Appendix 5. Within this,
I articulated the rights of the participant to not be recorded or photographed, to pull out of the
study at any time and to anonymise their identity by default. The need for anonymising
participant names is clear for my research, given the persistent socio-political influence of caste
and class at the village level which creates power hierarchies between villagers as well as their
relationships with private intermediaries or government officials (Himanshu et al, 2016).
The interview transcripts were anonymised and arranged into a coding system in relation to the
thematic round and the interview number. For example, scoping interviewees were numbered
A1-8, round one interviews in Kacharam numbered B1-65, round two interviews in Kacharam
numbered C1-68 and round three interviews numbered D1-69. The supplementary interviews
took place in rounds two and three so were labelled either C or D. Interviewees were cited as:
(D1, farmer, 24/3/19), giving the interview number and round, the primary occupation of the
interviewee and the date it was carried out. The interview transcripts, audio recordings, paper
surveys and household survey data Excel sheets were either stored locally in a password
protected safe or password protected online as per GDPR regulations and not shared or
accessed by anyone except myself. The data was backed up in three different locations
including encrypted USB sticks and encrypted University of Manchester cloud storage
accounts, requiring two-factor authentication. A list of all anonymised interviewees can be
found in Appendix 1.
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3.10 Limitations of the fieldwork
This section will explore the limitations of the fieldwork and how I mitigated them.
The main limitation was the fieldwork’s focus on one village, rather than a comparative study
across different villages. This approach is not statistically representative to the wider political
economy of agrarian change in Telangana or India. However, studying a village helps explore
external dynamics of agrarian change through intensive study of day-to-day inner workings
(Harriss-White, 2012). The purpose of the research was to observe the lived reality of Bt cotton
adoption and tubewell irrigation in the Liberalised Green Revolution for smallholder farmers
in Telangana, reflecting their status as the dominant class, crop and irrigation technologies at
the state level and India. Intensive ethnographic fieldwork in one village and supplementary
interviews over 8 months provided a rich picture of the processes within the broader political
economy trends in agriculture in the Liberalised Green Revolution.
Secondly, I did not conduct any focus groups during fieldwork. This was due to logistical
problems as households were unwilling to give more than an hours’ time for interviews and we
were unsure of their availability in advance. Farmers were only available between 7am and
10am, and even then, we intruded on their morning household activities. Logistical problems
made bringing together villagers for focus groups at set times not possible. To mitigate this, I
surveyed the 98% of the village in household surveys and interviewed almost 42% of the
households in the village so I could corroborate the experiences shared across households
which would approximate the benefits of focus groups.
Finally, I could not interview any moneylenders, government groundwater department officials
or government agricultural extension officers despite repeated attempts in person and over the
phone. However, I obtained extensive information on the role of informal moneylenders as
private intermediaries in the Liberalised Green Revolution and the absence of government
officers in extension in tubewells and Bt cotton. Hence, I came away with a good idea of the
predatory informal credit markets and the absent government role in the area and how they
operate. The next chapters 4, 5 and 6 are the empirical chapters that will answer the research
questions for the thesis.
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Chapter 4 - What are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in the
Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana?
4.1 Introduction
Chapter 3 detailed the methodology of the thesis, justifying the choice of an ethnographic
mixed methods case study comprised of interviews and household surveys. Chapter 3
subsequently outlined the fieldwork data collection and field site selection process in
Telangana before providing a profile of Kacharam, the village selected for this thesis. Finally,
Chapter 3 described positionality, ethics, and limitations of the fieldwork. This chapter is the
first of three empirical chapters for the thesis that answers the first research question: “What
are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in the Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana?”.
Historically, the state of Telangana featured a predominantly rainfed subsistence farming
environment with low rainfall and unreliable monsoons, alongside poor productivity laterite
soils. Due to its marginal environment where only 20% of the cropped area was irrigated even
as late as 1980 (DES India, 2019a, b), Telangana missed out on the Green Revolution, as policy
makers focused on more favourable agroecological regions for crop and infrastructure
investments (Bharucha, 2019). Agriculture consisted of cultivating sorghum and millets;
traditional dryland food crops well suited to drought prone environments (Louis, 2015).
The Liberalised Green Revolution entered as the state faced economic crisis in the 1990s, as
debt levels had increased from $4.7 million to $10.5 million between 1980 and 1995, increasing
the interest repayments by 12x in this period (Mooij, 2007). In response to this, the newly
elected Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu from the incumbent TDP party sought to reform
the state economy after this crisis, as the national government faced a macroeconomic crisis
too in 1991 (Banerjee and Duflo, 2019). The new model for the state was to increase economic
growth through privatisation, reduce public spending and increase private investment,
including in agriculture (Vaditya, 2017). This culminated in a 1999 collaborative report with
the World Bank titled “Vision 2020” which argued for the reduction of agricultural subsidies
in rice, electricity for groundwater and opening up international commodity markets
(Bandhopadhyay, 2001). In doing so, Andhra Pradesh implemented structural reforms under
the aegis of the World Bank at a scale and veracity unlike other states since 1995 (Posani,
2009).
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This chapter argues that cotton farming was a key element of the Liberalised Green Revolution
in Telangana since the 1990s. Key reforms in the cotton sector in India in the 1990s included
permitting 100% FDI from international seed firms, removal of import tariffs on cotton seeds
and the opening of the domestic cotton sector to international commodity markets, creating a
boom in private sector cotton development (Mohanakumar, 2010). Hybrid seeds were patented
to be replaced each year and worked only in optimal conditions of high input and pesticide
application, guaranteeing sales for private input dealers (Siddiqui, 2020). In addition, input
firms also sold inputs on credit in interlocked factor markets, guaranteeing a harvest price with
farmers in the output market (Sinha, 2020). For farmers, credit availability, the prospect of a
high market price, and the marketing of cotton seeds by local input firms transformed semi-
arid Telangana into the centre of smallholder cotton capitalism in India (Ramamurthy, 2011).
By the 2000s however, widespread pest problems from the bollworm pest, a common pest in
India for cotton, in private hybrid seed technologies reduced yields in the cotton sector
(Venkateshwarlu and Da Corta, 2001). To solve the crisis, the Indian government imported and
approved Bt cotton or Bacillus Thuringiensis, a GM hybrid cotton created by US agribusiness
giant Monsanto, that was bred with pest resistance qualities to tackle the bollworm (Gutierrez
et al, 2020). It retained hybrid properties like its predecessor, which continued the guaranteed
seed and input market for input dealers on an annual basis (Glover, 2010b). Following
regulatory approval in 2002, Bt cotton was quickly adopted in Telangana, making up 95% of
all cotton grown in the region by 2015 (Stone and Flachs, 2015). This boosted cotton growth
in Telangana to 4.5% between 1990-2008 (Reddy, 2011). Cotton in Telangana became the
biggest crop by area at almost 2 million hectares by 2018 from just 163,000 hectares in 1985,
and the third biggest cotton growing state in India (DES India, 2018; 2019a, b).
In the fieldwork village of Kacharam, farmers relied on subsistence rainfed crops sorghum,
millets, and castor. But by the late 1990s and early 2000s a culmination of factors prompted
the transition to Bt cotton. Push factors such as pests, harvest failures, disease, low market
prices and the rising cost of household expenditure on goods and services necessitated a shift
away from subsistence agriculture. Equally, the high market price of Bt cotton and aspirations
of material prosperity drove farmers to adopt Bt cotton. The withdrawal of the public sector in
agriculture saw input firms as seed salesmen, creditor, and extension advisor to push up
adoption rates amongst rainfed smallholder farmers in Kacharam.
111
Within 20 years of introduction since the mid-2000s, 85% of the village relied on Bt cotton as
a monocrop cash crop. Bt cotton provided commensurate profitability within the first five years
of adoption, but gradually, the capital and input intensive crop increased cotton yield instability
as farmers hedged their bets on one crop. This was also the case for Nalgonda district and
Telangana more widely, as well as in India, as shown in Chapter 2 (DES India, 2018; Kranthi
and Stone, 2020). Worsening monsoon variability and low yields from growing a capital
intensive cash crop in rainfed conditions perpetuated cycles of indebtedness from high interest
informal credit, with farmers renewing loans annually to cover their losses, household
expenditures and repay interest. In the fieldwork survey year 2018, 65% of farmers made a loss
from cotton, across all castes, classes, and gender categories.
The absence of the government in extension services made farmers rely on private input dealers
for extension advice and to buy inputs and seeds on credit. Input firms recommended
maximising fertiliser and pesticide application or buying new seeds whenever Bt cotton failed,
rather than to irrigate the crop with their tubewells, as I demonstrate in Chapter 5. They used
their monopoly role in credit, extension, and input provision to increase sales of inputs and
seeds despite the agroclimatic unsuitability of Bt cotton. Overall, Bt cotton in Kacharam in the
Liberalised Green Revolution saw the universal adoption of the crop but increased
indebtedness and yield stagnation in the long term, making farmers to rely on non-farm
incomes to make ends meet. This was the opposite of the linear increase in yields and structural
transformation as was expected by proponents of private sector led technology growth in
agriculture (Zhou, 2010).
In answering the research question: “What are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in the
Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana?”, I will structure the chapter as follows. First, I
will analyse the antecedent events and decisions by farmers in Telangana and Kacharam for
adopting Bt cotton so rapidly in the early 2000s. Second, I will focus on the cotton outcomes
for farmers in Kacharam across different categories. Finally, I look at the processes involved
in its adoption and production and the constraints facing farming livelihoods in Telangana
before concluding.
112
4.2 Economic motivations, ecology, and the switch to Bt cotton
Agriculture in Kacharam reflected much of semi-arid and dryland parts of rural India in the
centuries-long continuity of subsistence farming (Roy, 2007). Red laterite soils and fleeting
monsoon rains from June to September regulated the choice of crop to be drought resilient and
able to survive in poor soils (Gine et al, 2008). The emphasis of farming was on household
food security, and so sorghum and pearl millet were the traditional crops of Telangana under
rainfed and semi-arid environments. Sorghum and millets also provided fodder for livestock,
which in turn provided the fertiliser for growing crops (Freed and Freed, 2002). Seeds were
saved between each harvest and exchanged in kind for labour or food between different castes
according to their caste occupations e.g. cobblers, basket weavers, shepherds, pot makers, palm
wine makers and agricultural labourers. As a middle-aged male OBC farmer in Kacharam
explained:
“People used to grow mostly millets and castor…we also used to rely mostly on the
crops we grew…we didn’t used to go outside. There were no debts then people didn’t
have money so they would trade their food crops for other things they needed.” (C61,
farmer, 28/6/19)
The practice of exchanging seeds in kind for harvests from food crops or for labour between
castes in Kacharam were also the systems of exchange and subsistence livelihood elsewhere in
Telangana (Flachs, 2016). Soon however, growing subsistence crops became unviable at the
turn of the 1990s. Economic liberalisation brought markets to the forefront of agriculture and
rural society, affecting profound social and cultural change at the village level (Jodhka, 2014).
New options for goods and services entered the village, including private and English medium
schools (Kingdon, 2020), access to medical care and more expensive dowries for marriages in
the village, increasing household expenditure into the 1990s and creating a commercial society
in rural India (Jakobsen, 2018). Moreover, changing desires and aspirations for material
consumption through liberalisation in the 1990s and the diffusion of middle-class lifestyles in
nearby cities via migration labour also increased demand for durable goods such as motorbikes,
TVs, and mobile phones (Servet and Saiag, 2013). This matched the trends in rural Telangana
and India as spending on durable goods increased as a share of annual household spending
from 2.7% in 1993-4 to 6.1% in 2011-12 in India (NSSO, 2013d), as well as rising ownership
of TVs, mobile phones, and motorbikes in rural Telangana (NFHS, 2016).
113
The entry of consumerism into the village necessitated a shift in the subsistence agricultural
system that prevailed in Kacharam, putting economic and social pressure on farmers to grow
commodity crops to keep up with rising household costs. As Louis (2015) also notes in her
ethnographic work in Medak district in Telangana, growing sorghum was no longer tenable for
farmers having to pay school fees, medical expenses, and dowry in a marketized society,
forcing farmers to adopt cash crop agriculture.
The entry of Bt cotton in Kacharam came in the early 2000s. Cotton was sought after as a cash
crop in semi-arid parts of India due to its high yields and market price. In the 1990s,
liberalisation in the entry of FDI for seeds, opening of the domestic cotton market for
international exports and the proliferation of private seed and input firms and widely available
informal credit brought cotton to the centre stage in rainfed regions of India, including
Telangana (Vakulabharanam, 2004).
Given the opportunity cost of switching to cotton, the aspiration and belief in the new profitable
cotton crop was often seen as the ticket to a better, more affluent life. As Herring (2008) notes
in Warangal district in Telangana, farmers are active participants in technological adoption and
higher incomes when it was made available to them. Moreover, the reality of subsistence
farming for many was a difficult livelihood of uncertainty and hardship. Farmer B7, an OBC
farmer with 1 ha land reflected on the drudgery and hardship of his parents. Farming in the past
was not a rural idyll, as he described:
“The family had to work hard we were hand to mouth then, [My] father worked even
harder [than me]…but the yield was not that high we used to take loans to eat food.”
(B7, farmer, 5/2/19)
The high market price of cotton and ability to grow it in rainfed conditions was the silver bullet
out of subsistence and into prosperity. Cotton was the only option for farmers for their financial
obligations but also was a symbol of upward mobility and desire, summed up by farmers by
the phrase “manchi kalam”, meaning a good life. Therefore, sorghum and millet cultivation
was juxtaposed by the potential market incentives of Bt cotton in Kacharam, and so the choice
to switch was a simple one. For an elderly female OBC farmer in Kacharam, the economic
incentives were too great to pass up compared to continuing with sorghum and millets:
“[Sorghum] did [bring food for the household] but cotton had a higher market price so
everyone switched to that. Sorghum, millets…their time has gone. Now it is the time
for cotton.” (B2, farmer, 2/5/19)
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The practical realities of subsistence farming in an increasingly marketized economy is also
echoed in other ethnographic work in Telangana. Reddy (2011) for example shows how
sorghum was only an option for farmers due to the lack of other available alternatives and
possibilities. Furthermore, Herring and Rao (2012) explain from Warangal district in
Telangana that farmers often had landholdings of less than 1 ha which required farmers to
maximise their returns from what they had, and cotton provided that as a high yielding cash
crop. Although farmers knew the high risk of capital and input intensive cotton agriculture, it
was a risk worth taking if it meant high market prices and a better life (Shah, 2012).
The economic incentive was significant for farmers to switch to Bt cotton in a rapidly
monetised consumer economy. On top, environmental push factors also played a role in
Kacharam. During interviews, 100% of the 65 participants reported that the gradual exhaustion
of sorghum and millet yields were due to their inability to control pests and predation of the
crop by birds. As one farmer recounted:
“No one else [is] planting sorghum if one person plants it then the birds will come and
we can’t plant alone”. (B11, farmer, 30/4/19)
Sorghum was an important food and fodder crop but also attracted birds which stripped fields.
Farmers needed their children to stand guard in the fields when the crop reached harvest time.
However, farmers in Kacharam felt that as their children now attended school, they no longer
had the labour to take care of the fields and look after livestock (B12, farmer, 1/5/19). In
addition, as more farmers grew Bt cotton, the task of protecting the crop against birds became
even harder, concentrating the pest problem on the remaining farmers growing subsistence
crops (Freed and Freed, 2002). The pest problem was compounded by the difficulty in
processing millets and castor, the secondary non-food crop grown before cotton in Kacharam.
Interviewee B3, an elderly female OBC farmer explained that in her parents’ generation women
primarily threshed the millets:
“It is easier now. They had to crush and thresh the seeds for millets it was very time
consuming they used to dry then pick the[m].” (B3, farmer, 1/5/19)
Interviewee B14, an elderly male OBC farmer concurred:
“For millets you have a lot of steps you have to deshell it process it carve it many things
then the birds eat it”. (B14, farmer, 1/5/19)
115
The process of pressing castor into oil shared similarities in its difficulty for farmers.
Interviewee B2, an elderly female OBC farmer explained the difference in traditional crops
and Bt cotton when it came to harvest time:
“Now it is leisurely they plant cotton they come and take it from their house directly.
Now if you plant sorghum millets castor you have to dry it deshell it beat it pour liquid
on it that is hard work so we plant cotton.” (B2, farmer, 2/5/19)
In my interviews with farmers in Kacharam, it was evident that the elderly female farmers of
all castes felt that traditional crops were extremely laborious to process and the work was
gendered so females were tasked with this. The prospect of cotton being bought by the buyer
directly from the fields straight after harvest, plus at a higher market price was an easy choice
to make at the time to move away from sorghum and other prevailing crops grown in
Kacharam. Finally, the problems with crop predation were also compounded by the variability
in monsoons which often caused harvest failure in Kacharam, and remained a problem for Bt
cotton too.
The problems with sorghum and millets and changing market conditions in Kacharam lead to
the decline in cropping area for these traditional subsistence crops. The decline of sorghum and
millet farming is also seen in aggregate figures in Telangana and the Nalgonda, indicating the
changes in Kacharam to be representative of wider agrarian change. Figures 21 and 22 show
the absolute decline in area of sorghum and pearl millets in both Telangana and Nalgonda. As
Reddy et al (2014a) note, sorghum was the biggest crop grown traditionally in Telangana as a
rainfed food crop, making up almost 60% of the total cropped area in the 1960s. Due to changes
mentioned in this section, sorghum not only declined as a share of total cropped area but also
in absolute terms to less than 2% as of 2017 (DES Telangana, 2017).
116
Figure 21 - Telangana Sorghum and Pearl Millet Net Area 1955-2018
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006), DES Telangana (2016), DES India (2018; 2019a, b)
Figure 22 - Nalgonda Sorghum and Pearl Millet Net Area 1955-2018
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006), DES Telangana (2016), DES India (2018; 2019a, b)
Rising household expenditure, environmental factors and changing aspirations and economic
incentives drove the shift away from subsistence farming to Bt cotton in Kacharam.
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4.3 The rise of Bt cotton in Telangana
This section outlines the political economy conditions in which cotton adoption took place in
Kacharam and Telangana. Andhra Pradesh was one of the first states in India to introduce Bt
cotton after approval in 2002. For the Chief Minister Chandra Babu Naidu, adopting
biotechnology was a key step to agricultural modernisation, part of the “Vision 2020” plan for
the state government to reform agriculture from subsistence to export oriented commercial
cropping.
As Bowles (2003: p421-422) describes:
“Regarding, biotechnology, Naidu has said, “I want [Andhra Pradesh] to be [number
one] in biotech. That is our goal. I think we are marching ahead”. In its effort to become
the new headquarters of biotechnology, the state has implemented incentives such as
“single-window” system for biotechnology licensing and approvals…Andhra Pradesh
has adopted a development plan, Vision 2020, which includes an outline of the state’s
long term plans and goals for biotechnology and for agriculture. Vision 2020 calls for
Andhra Pradesh to become a powerhouse of Indian agriculture…as agriculture itself
becomes more productive, efficient and technology intensive, and moves from a
subsistence activity to an economic one.”
The state government’s vision was to facilitate private sector biotechnology for the structural
transformation of the state towards commercial farming for economic growth, much alike the
Maharashtra and Gujarat did during the Liberalised Green Revolution (Shah, 2005; 2008; 2011;
Chaudhuri, 2019).
In Kacharam, farmers began adopting Bt cotton in the early 2000s soon after its approval in
India. Local input dealers in nearby towns began to market and sell Bt cotton seeds, which
spread via word of mouth in the village. After being adopted by higher class farmers in the
village, other farmers began imitating and adopting Bt cotton. This also reflects the trajectory
of Bt cotton diffusion in Maharashtra (Maertens, 2017). In under two decades, Bt cotton
increased cotton adoption in Kacharam from 0% to 100% across all castes, classes and gender
categories. Furthermore, 85% of the 105 farming households in the village planted Bt cotton
as a monocrop. For smallholder farmers in Telangana, Bt cotton was a high market price cash
crop that could survive high temperatures in semi-arid conditions (Ramamurthy, 2011).
Informal credit access also helped them finance cotton investments with no collateral and small
landholding sizes (Stone and Flachs, 2018).
118
The rapid increase of Bt cotton also occurred at the Nalgonda district level and Telangana as
shown in Figures 23 and 24 below. In particular, after Bt cotton’s introduction in 2002, the
cotton area increased by almost 5x by 2019 in Nalgonda and by 3x in Telangana. In Nalgonda
district, Bt cotton by 2019 made up 49% of the total cropped area, reflecting the rapid expansion
of cotton in Kacharam in just two decades. In Telangana, Bt cotton area increased to almost 2
million hectares by 2019, becoming the single biggest crop by area in the state at 32% of the
total cropped area (DES Telangana, 2020), more than rice which only made up 20%. Bt cotton
also drove Telangana to become the third biggest cotton grower in India via smallholder
farmers (DES India, 2018).
Figure 23 - Telangana Cotton Area 1955-2018
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006), DES Telangana (2016), DES India (2018; 2019a, b)
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Figure 24 - Nalgonda Cotton Area 1955-2018
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006), DES Telangana (2016), DES India (2018; 2019a, b)
This chapter argues that in a deregulated seeds market, thousands of private sector input firms
quickly entered the market and iterated, duplicated the original Bt cotton strain from Monsanto-
Mahyco (Bownas, 2016). In Kacharam, farmers followed early adopter high caste/class farmers
by hierarchical learning, as well being enticed by the high market price (Maertens, 2017).
However, Bt cotton also required annual repurchasing of seeds plus intensive capital and input
investments. Furthermore, the absence of extension services from government also meant
farmers relied on input dealers for advice who prescribed intensive application of inputs and
purchasing new seed brands as the solution to farmer’s harvest failures, instead of advising on
the problem of leaving the crop to be rainfed. Reflecting changes at the district and state level,
increasingly variable and declining monsoons for rainfed Bt cotton made it prone to frequent
harvest failures and rising indebtedness. For the year 2018, household surveys revealed that
65% of all households made a loss from Bt cotton across all castes, classes, and genders.
However, flexible credit terms from moneylenders kept supplying credit to farmers to renew
loans annually as long as they repaid the interest repayment.
0
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Desperate to recoup their losses, farmers risked further Bt cotton investments and loans,
increasing their debt burden and interest repayments further. Many farmers were entrapped in
interlocked factor markets, where they purchased inputs on credit and sold their harvests to pay
back their loans (Harriss-White, 2020). Extension advice to keep replanting new varieties and
apply inputs more intensively increased interest repayments too (Aga, 2018). Given 85% of all
farmers grew Bt cotton as a monocrop, hedging all their bets increasingly failed to bring the
income needed for meeting household expenditure. Within two decades in the Liberalised
Green Revolution, farmers depended on selling assets or working in non-farm wage labour to
stay afloat with debt repayments from Bt cotton. The following sections explore the
consequences of Bt cotton adoption and failed outcomes.
4.3.1 Cotton outcomes in Kacharam and Telangana
Bt cotton came to Kacharam and Telangana in the early 2000s soon after its introduction in
India through thousands of local level input dealers who set up in towns peripheral to villages.
For example, in Kacharam, the nearby town of Devarakonda had just three input shops up until
the 2000s, but after Bt cotton was introduced, the number of input dealers quickly increased to
15 by the year 2019. A local fertiliser shop owner corroborated this:
“[Only two input dealers were there before Bt] after Bt came there were many.”
(C21, input dealer, 4/6/19)
Input dealers began promoting and marketing Bt cotton to nearby villages, as well as increasing
input shops and spreading adoption through word of mouth and targeting the largest
landholders in the village. I observed that seed firms also promoted Bt cotton and pesticides
through TV adverts featuring celebrity endorsements, encompassing both a local and national
level push to maximise Bt cotton adoption. Figures 25 and 26 show some of the examples of
Bt cotton marketing.
121
Figure 25 - Celebrity Bt Cotton TV Advert 1
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Figure 26 - Celebrity Bt Cotton TV Advert 2
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
122
The culmination of marketing efforts from input dealers provided the impetus for farmers to
switch. Many input firms sold not only seed but also diversified as into selling inputs and credit.
Farmers often bought seeds and inputs on credit and sold back their harvest to the input dealer
at an advanced fixed market price plus 24-36% annual interest in an interlocked factor market
(Jaleta et al, 2009; Taylor, 2013b). This financing mechanism made it possible for smallholder
farmers with minimal assets and collateral to invest in Bt cotton. From the farmer’s perspective,
the economic necessity to leave subsistence farming, higher market prices and farmers
observing the adoption of the crop by neighbours started the wave of adoption throughout the
village. This was emphatically stated by an elderly female farmer OBC farmer who witnessed
the rapid transition to Bt cotton in the village, confirmed also with 50 out of 65 (77%) farmers
in interviews:
“Everyone plants cotton now… cotton had a higher market price so everyone switched
to that one by one people switched.” (B2, farmer, 2/5/19)
The ability to access Bt cotton was universal amongst farming households due to the proximity
of input dealers in Devarakonda less than 15km away and as input dealers sold inputs on credit.
Hence after hearing about Bt cotton, farmers could adopt it quickly and finance it for the short
term. This trend of Bt cotton adoption in Kacharam followed other examples in the state of
Telangana. Dev and Rao’s (2007) study in Nalgonda and Warangal districts found that the most
common way for Bt cotton to spread was for farmers to imitate their neighbours at 46%. In
their work in Warangal, Stone et al (2014) referred to the flood of Bt cotton as farmers
“following the herd”, basing adoption on what their neighbours were planting, regardless of
whether it was successful.
Farming was conducted as a household unit for cotton mono cropping households, with the
husband and wife dividing different tasks within cotton production process. This is compared
to farming production systems in other contexts in India and Africa whereby the male usually
grows the cash crop and the female grows the household food crops (Rao et al, 2020). In
Kacharam, the men tilled the soil with tractors, weeded with oxen, distributed the seeds,
purchased the inputs and sprayed pesticides. The females picked the cotton at the harvest period
and also weeded but by hand.
In the first five years after adoption, Bt cotton brought the expected yields and profits for all
classes and castes of farmers, confirmed by 55 out of 65 (85%) interviewees. Even though the
cost of cultivation was high, the yields compensated for investments. Farmer C57, a middle
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aged OBC divorcee woman with 1 ha land, detailed the prosperity Bt cotton brought to her
family after initially planting crop, stating:
“After cotton came, [life] was better [as] we had [economic] security. We couldn’t
repay any debts [back] then we had poor houses and lived in poverty. After cotton came,
I could repay debts and buy some land….the expenses are higher but it is better now as
we can make money with cotton.” (C57, farmer, 10/6/19).
Bt cotton in initial years delivered higher incomes and profits than subsistence crops, allowing
farmers to reinvest their profits into their household, as well as being able to repay debts. For
the initial years of Bt cotton, the high input costs were compensated by incomes and the
freedom to improve their economic situation, something which subsistence farming did not
provide. Looking to Telangana more widely, Rao and Dev (2007) found in Nalgonda and
Warangal districts that yields from Bt cotton increased 32% relative to non-Bt cotton, with net
incomes increasing by 83%. However, they also found that while pesticide costs reduced by
18% via Bt cotton’s in-built pest resistance to the bollworm pest, overall production costs
increased by 17% from rising costs from seeds and labour for sowing, pollinating, and
harvesting the crop (ibid). Similarly, Stone (2011) studied four villages from 2003-7 in
Warangal district, finding a yield increase of 18% and decrease in pesticide usage with Bt
cotton relative to existing cotton varieties.
Bt cotton’s positive returns in Kacharam however stopped after five years of planting, with
farmers finding that monsoon variability and declining quantity of rainfall over the years made
harvest failures more common. For the year 2018, household surveys I conducted suggested
that 65% of farmers across all social categories of class, caste and gender made a loss from Bt
cotton. This was based on a 98% sample representative of the entire village. Table 6 below
presents the outcomes from Bt cotton in Kacharam for 2018 in more detail.
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Table 6 - Bt Cotton Outcomes
Category Total
Farming
Households
Average
Area
(Ha)
Profit
(%)
Break
Even
(%)
Loss
(%)
Average
Income
Per Ha
($)
Average
Expenses
Per Ha
($)
Net
Income
Per Ha
($)
All Farmers 105 1.45 33 (31) 4 (4) 68 (65) 411 511 -102
OBC 74 1.60 25 (34) 4 (5) 45 (61) 409 510 -106
SC 23 1.07 6 (26) 0 (0) 17 (74) 447 521 -112
ST 8 1.11 2 (25) 0 (0) 6 (75) 347 502 -126
Widow 11 1.11 5 (45) 0 (0) 6 (55) 485 494 -8
Non-Widow 94 1.49 26 (26) 4 (4) 64 (69) 396 513 -117
Marginal (<1
ha)
33 0.57 11 (33) 2 (6) 20 (61) 698 837 -209
Small (1-2 ha) 56 1.56 19 (34) 2 (3) 35 (63) 433 534 -101
Medium
(>2-5 ha)
16 2.63 3 (19) 0 (0) 13 (81) 278 367 -89
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019).
The lack of social differentiation across all castes, classes, and genders in losses from Bt cotton
meant that yields across all farmers were badly hit, enough to result in negative net incomes.
Rather than 2018 being just a one-off bad harvest year in Kacharam, 50 out of 65 (77%) farmers
interviewed consistently reported that the problem of Bt cotton failures was a recurrent
phenomenon in the last four to five years.
The specific problem for farmers in Kacharam were erratic monsoons afflicting Bt cotton in
recent years. Farmer C2, an elderly OBC female farmer with 0.1 ha of land, lost $182 in 2018,
which she put down to worsening rainfall:
“We didn't get enough rainfall to have a good harvest and recover our investments. It
is not because of pests in fact only if there was a lot of rainfall would there be a problem
of pests. The problem we have is that we plant the seeds anticipating the rainfall but
then the rain comes sporadically and the seeds dry up. We cannot plant a second time
and try again as it is too late by now.” (C2, farmer, 12/6/19)
Dev and Rao (2007) observed that Bt cotton grown in rainfed villages in in Telangana during
the year 2004-5 also had equal losses between all castes, classes and genders as input costs
exceeded yields. With Bt cotton, the differences between farmer yields in rainfed areas were
limited as monsoon rains affected yields for all groups equally. Farmer C2 recognised pests to
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also be an issue causing poor yields, but Bt cotton drying up midway through the harvest was
more of a problem. In a household survey 57 out of 65 (87%) farmers interviewed felt that
monsoons were worsening with increasing frequency in the last five years, leaving their debt
fuelled investments in fertiliser, seeds, and pesticides to become unrealised and forcing them
to rely on non-farm incomes to make up for the losses. Good Bt cotton yields depended on at
least 500mm of rainfall in the monsoon season over four months through from June to October
(Sharma et al, 2018), which is higher than the Nalgonda district average of 474mm (CGWB
Telangana, 2019). This account from farmer C56, an OBC female farmer with 1.5 ha whose
household made a loss of $367 in 2018, noted the temporality of Bt cotton yields:
“Since we have planted cotton initially it has been good but only if there is rain…for
the last four years we haven’t had good harvests from cotton…we haven’t been able to
absorb input costs….we made a loss this year. The lack of rainfall is the biggest problem
we face now.” (C56, farmer, 11/6/19)
Semi-arid areas are characterised by hot and dry weather all year round and a growing period
of only four months from June to September, as 70-80% of total rainfall each year fell during
this period (DES Telangana, 2016). The rainfed environment was also compounded by
Telangana’s frequent periods of drought in the monsoon season, making even monsoons
unreliable to grow rainfed crops. In the last 30 years in Telangana for example, every single
year has seen a drought in an at least one sub-district region (ibid). This meant that even in
good monsoon years, drought still occurred within Telangana.
Figure 27 - Dried-up Bt Cotton Field in Mid Monsoon in June 2019
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
126
The entry of Bt cotton in the village brought the promises of high market prices and profitability
from a cash crop, an option farmers never before. Each Bt cotton harvest involved large
investments to be recouped as a minimum to make a profit and for the gamble to pay off. In
2018, 69% of farmers made a loss or broke even from farming, so the gamble didn’t pay off
due to worsening monsoons. The expectation of a good monsoon in Kacharam used to be a
regular occurrence during subsistence agriculture, but with cotton, it was hit and miss. Bt
cotton’s main draw was the possibility of high yields and profits for the adopting farmer, but
this did not come to fruition if the crop did not get enough rainfall. For farmer B6, a young
OBC farmer with 1.5 ha, 2018 brought Bt cotton losses of $212, pushing her to work in
agricultural labour in the dry season and her husband as a stonemason to make up for the losses.
She revealed:
“There is a good rate for cotton but it is useless if the cotton doesn't grow… if we had
good yields then yes we would benefit from it but that hasn't been the case now for
many years.” (B6, farmer, 24/6/19)
In addition to the rainfall problems, other authors mention that new pests outside of the
bollworm developed resistance to Bt cotton, so even if there was good rainfall, yields were still
low due to pests (Kranthi and Stone, 2020). Bt cotton is a very fickle crop to grow in rainfed
conditions, requiring consistent rainfall and application of pesticides and fertiliser at various
stages of the four-month growing cycle between June and September. As Gray and Dowd-
Uribe (2013: p696-697) found in semi-arid smallholder Bt cotton environments in Burkina
Faso:
“Cotton is a risky crop. Farmers can do most things right and still be at risk of a poor
harvest. Many of the risks are environmental and thus out of a farmer's direct control.
Drought at crucial points in the plant's lifecycle can reduce yields.”
If at any stage of the growing process Bt cotton did not receive enough rainfall, it would dry
up. In addition to the quantity and consistency of rainfall over time, the timing of the rainfall
was also crucial for farmers. In the fieldwork year of 2019 for example, farmers did not plant
cotton at all even as late as July 31st, meaning that adequate rainfall did not arrive even two
months after the traditional June start. In an interview with farmer C23, an elderly OBC female
with 1 ha, she revealed that in 2019 the monsoons were over a month late, not falling even
towards the end of June, when they were usually expected to come in late May:
127
“…We haven't even started planting this year the rains are so late.” (C23, farmer,
18/6/19)
The growing season of Bt cotton had to match the monsoon rains. If it was delayed, the harvest
would not come as the monsoon became weaker into October, unable to sustain a harvest (Gine
et al, 2008). If the growing season was delayed by more than two weeks, it damaged the harvest
that year. For the thesis, I used long-term district level monsoon trends in Nalgonda and
Telangana as indications of what is happening to the quantity of monsoon rainfall in Kacharam,
owing to a lack of village level rainfall data. Figures 28 and 29 below shows the trends for both
Nalgonda district and Telangana. In both cases, the long-term trend lines slope downwards
overt time, in agreement with farmers sentiments in Kacharam, confirming qualitative insights
into how farmers have experienced a declining monsoon.
Figure 28 - Telangana Monsoon Rainfall 1951-2016
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006), DES Telangana (2016)
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Figure 29 - Nalgonda Monsoon Rainfall 1951-2016
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006), DES Telangana (2016)
Longitudinal meteorological analysis by Shashikala (2015) in Nalgonda district also reveals
that between 1988-2012, 18 out of 25 years had below average rainfall years. Finally,
longitudinal ethnographic studies in Mahabubnagar district between 1990 and 2013 found that
farmers perceived monsoons were getting more erratic and declining over time in 2013 relative
to the 1990s study visit (Surendra et al, 2014). An econometric model by Guntukula (2020)
shows that 76% of cotton yields are determined by climate variables, in particular rainfall and
temperatures, so cotton yields decrease with lower rainfall and temperatures. With climate
change, rainfall variability, climate shocks and higher temperatures are set to reduce
agricultural productivity between 10% and 40% by 2100, with Bt cotton production predicted
to decline by 15-25% by 2050 (ICRIER, 2018). This makes rainfed Bt cotton cultivation an
even riskier economic prospect in the future than what we have seen in Kacharam.
The culmination of declining quantity, consistency and timing of monsoon rainfall has been
the socio-ecological driver of declining Bt cotton yields in Kacharam. The phenomenon of
declining Bt cotton yields in Telangana has been posited as a pest problem for Stone and Flachs
(2015), who noted that new pests emerged after 2007 in Warangal that halted Bt cotton yield
growth. However, in Kacharam, declining monsoons in a rainfed environment mainly caused
Bt cotton to dry up. This was shown clearly by the 65% losses across all groups of farmers and
the failure of rains to arrive in 2019 even up to July 31st, as farmers abandoned the Bt cotton
crop as a result.
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129
Bt cotton outcomes in Kacharam over time have seen fleeting successes followed by persistent
failures. More broadly, Kranthi and Stone (2020) argue that Bt cotton yields have stagnated at
a Telangana and India level while input costs in seeds, fertiliser and pesticides have all
continued to intensify, due to erratic rainfall and pests in semi-arid growing environments such
as Telangana. This is also backed by the aggregate trends in Bt cotton across Nalgonda and
Telangana. Figure 30 below shows that after consistent increases in Bt cotton from the early
2000s, Bt cotton yields peaked in Telangana in 2008 at 460kg/ha. After this period, yields
stagnated, never reaching this peak again as of 2018, the latest year for recorded data. In
Nalgonda, Figure 31 shows Bt cotton yields increased up to the year 2014 at 393kg/ha, and
since this peak has declined and stagnated (Vakulabharanam, 2004; DES India, 2019a, b). Both
the trends in Nalgonda and Telangana reflect the farmer’s sentiments in Kacharam of declining
yields in the last five years.
Figure 30 - Telangana Cotton Yields 1970-2018
Source: Vakulabharanam (2004) and DES India (2019a, b)
0
50
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ld (
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/Hec
tare
)
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Figure 31 - Nalgonda Cotton Yields 1970-2018
Source: Vakulabharanam (2004) and DES India (2019a, b)
Overall, Bt cotton did not deliver the results it promised in Kacharam and Telangana, creating
a non-farm reliance in the long run. Despite the rapid spread and adoption by 100% of farmers
in the village, the Liberalised Green Revolution technology has resulted in a brief rise followed
by a sustained and deep stagnation in yields and outcomes. In Kacharam, this resulted in 65%
of farmers across all classes, castes and genders making a loss from Bt cotton in 2018,
corroborating with other village level studies in Telangana and aggregate data at the state and
district levels. Decreasing rainfall in the monsoon season as well as increasingly erratic timing
of rainfall in the monsoon made harvest failures common for Bt cotton. Monsoon data from
the state and district level as well as longitudinal ethnographic evidence has also corroborated
the declining rainfall in Kacharam. The next section will look at political economy factors of
why this occurred and the consequences for farmer livelihoods, alongside the socio-ecological
factors already discussed. It explores the role of informal debt and input dealers as input seller,
credit provider and extension advisor in a deregulated Bt cotton market.
0
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Yie
ld (
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/Hec
tare
)
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131
4.3.2 The consequences of Bt cotton failure in Kacharam and Telangana
The shift to cotton changed many things in Kacharam in a space of two decades. For the 85%
of farmers in Kacharam who grew it as a monocrop, it shifted the purpose of farming from
household food security and fodder to cash cropping for profitability. Bt cotton fetched a high
market price at $73 per 100kg, 3-5x the returns from traditional food crops (Dhanagare, 2016).
However, due to monsoon variability, farmers largely could not recoup these prices from the
input and seed investments they put into the crop. Profit, and you can overlook the costs of Bt
cotton and live on to the next harvest, but lose, then you face a torrent of insurmountable
problems.
Interlocking debt relations with input dealers added to the problem of Bt cotton. Most farmers
were unable to afford the cost of Bt cotton investments, so purchased seeds, fertiliser, and
pesticides on credit from input dealers. At the end of the harvest season, farmers sold their
cotton harvest at fixed price to the input dealer plus 24%-36% annual interest charged on top
of the repayment. Profits made net of these costs was could be used for household expenditure,
reinvestment, or savings. In recent years however, Bt cotton crop harvests increasingly failed
from erratic monsoons. This forced farmers to extend loans for another year from input dealers,
hoping that next year’s harvest repaid all the cumulative debts for the farmer. As that harvest
has increasingly not arrived, farmers have become engrained in debt relationships with input
dealers each time a Bt cotton crop fails (Gray and Dowd-Uribe, 2013). This perpetual debt
relation between input dealers and farmers represents a cycle of economic discipline and
control (Gerber, 2013; Vasquez, 2020) in the Liberalised Green Revolution. This has been
propagated by unreliable monsoons and harvests, high capital risks and cumulative interest
accruals from each loan.
Furthermore, the rollback of extension services in Telangana in the Liberalised Green
Revolution has also left farmers to depend on input dealers for extension advice. Profit
incentives from the input dealers however saw them recommending intensive application of
inputs, while leaving Bt cotton to be rainfed in Kacharam’s risky agroecological environment
to enter agricultural commercialisation. This final section therefore explores how these input
firms acted as input dealers, credit firms and extension officers to exacerbate the agroecological
risks from cultivating Bt cotton in a semi-arid environment.
132
4.3.3 Debt, risk and loss of economic control of rural livelihoods from Bt cotton
For farmers, yields were insufficient relative to the input expenses they invested, making them
indebted from Bt cotton. The short-term credit dispersal for inputs enabled farmers to access
the seeds and inputs to cultivate Bt cotton, but farmers pinned their debt repayment hopes on
its high yields (Srinivasulu, 2015). If farmers were unable to repay, the input lender renewed
the loan for another year for the next harvest with 24% to 36% interest on top. Farmer B2, an
elderly OBC farmer cultivating just 0.13 ha, lost $183 from Bt cotton in 2018, receiving 10x
lower yields than she expected at only 200kg, pushing her family to renew their loans from
input dealers until next year and use non-farm incomes to repay the interest amount. She
explained:
“Profit or loss we have to deal with it. [The input dealer] does not [relieve] a rupee of
the loan he adds it onto the next year he takes 3% interest per month.” (B2, farmer,
5/2/19)
If the farmer profits, then the inputs and interest is repaid, and the farmer takes a new loan out
for the coming season. If a farmer faces a harvest loss, they face short-term calm, being obliged
only to repay the interest immediately. This only delays the debt as interest accumulates into
the next harvest year. Although Bt cotton promised profitability, it also concentrated the risk
into one crop as harvest failures increased indebtedness amongst all farmers. Indebtedness in
Kacharam reflects the rise in rural indebtedness overall in Telangana. Between 2002 and 2013
for example, average rural debt in Telangana increased almost 6x across all size classes (Reddy,
2014). Telangana has among the highest rural indebtedness rates in India at 89%, compared to
an all-India average of 57% (NSSOa, 2013). This has been linked to a large extent to cash crop
cultivation and intensification such as Bt cotton by smallholders who adopted it rapidly in
recent decades (Kranthi and Stone, 2020).
Gray and Dowd-Uribe (2013: p699) explain the process of interlocked debt relations with Bt
cotton in semi-arid smallholder settings in Burkina Faso:
“Poorer farmers, dependent on cotton production for income and access to inputs, face
cycles of indebtedness, responding to deficits in their biophysical environment by self-
exploiting and mortgaging their crops to fulfil needs for both improved soil quality and
household livelihoods. Once indebted, farmers have diminished access to inputs on
133
credit, inhibiting their ability to pay back their cotton loans and making them more
prone to fall into debt again.”
Bt cotton was a capital intensive and debt fuelled cash crop that at one stage promised
profitability but increasingly failed to deliver in Kacharam, leaving farmers with debt. Yet they
were compelled to invest in Bt cotton to repay their debt and interest obligations and face
environmental uncertainty and risk of further debt from monsoon conditions referred to as a
“reproductive squeeze” (Watts, 1983; Green, 2019). The process of rural indebtedness in this
way created a self-reinforcing cycle, where the farmer fell into further debt each time they had
a harvest failure.
In less than two decades since its introduction, Bt transformed the agricultural landscape of
semi-arid and rainfed Telangana to become the single biggest cultivated crop in Nalgonda at
49% of the total cropped area and 32% for Telangana (DES India, 2019a, b). As Nagaraj et al
(2014) explain however, the shift to Bt cotton in the long run has only increased crop instability
and vulnerability by hedging all their bets on high input and high capital crops in a severely
agroecologically constrained environment.
In recognition of the indebtedness problems from informal credit in Telangana, efforts to
improve financial inclusion in India and Telangana have seen the expansion of formal rural
credit through banks and microcredit. Between 2007 and 2013 for example, the share of
institutional credit increased in rural Telangana from 33% to 50% across all classes (Reddy,
2014). In Telangana, this financial inclusion effort tried to reach lower castes such as OBCs,
STs and SCs who made up almost 90% of the state’s population (Benbabaali, 2016) in addition
to smallholder farmers owning <2ha land who made up 85% of the state’s farmers (DES
Telangana, 2016). Bank account access for ST, SCs and OBCs reached a high of 71% in
Telangana and 80% in Nalgonda district in 2013 (Kannibiran et al, 2017).
In Kacharam however, this increase in formal credit access belied the crucial role informal
credit plays (Guerin et al, 2012; 2013). Despite the expansion and availability of formal credit
which offered lower interest rates of 12-24% per year, farmers preferred input dealers to
finance Bt cotton for several reasons. First, microcredit and bank credit had strict collateral
terms based on landholdings and repayment timelines to repay the principle plus interest to
secure a new loan (Taylor, 2011; 2012). Microcredit also often only issued smaller loans of up
to $750 per year, which only just covered the total cost of Bt cotton expenses each year of $746
in Kacharam. These conditions were onerous on the farmer especially if they faced harvest
134
losses. Furthermore, farmers reported large amounts of paperwork, bribery and time taken to
get bank loans issued for low caste and low-class farmers relative to richer, more well-
connected farmers (C36, SC farmer, 21/6/19).
In comparison, input dealers offered to renew current loans even if the principle was untouched,
if the interest repayments were on time. For farmers, input dealers’ flexibility in offering new
loans without repayment allowed farmers to borrow to cover harvest failures. Farmers were
willing to tread water and pay off the interest year on year even though the interest rates charged
were much higher at up to 36% per year compared to 24% for formal sources. The calculus of
taking credit from input dealers in times of harvest failures was rationalised by farmer C56, an
elderly OBC female farmer, who last achieved a good Bt cotton harvest four years ago:
“The issue is we can't find loans [from banks] on time when we need them, we need to
therefore go to moneylenders even if it [is] higher interest. The bank doesn't lend when
we need it, but the moneylender does.” (C56, farmer, 11/6/19)
For cash poor farmers, input dealers were the unanimous choice for Bt cotton financing, despite
the cycles of indebtedness they created. The ability to extend the debt repayments to another
year and reinvest in Bt cotton by taking out new loans was a highly risky decision, but it also
offered temporary relief from debt repayment pressures. Furthermore, the sheer number of
input dealers in nearby towns to Kacharam made accessing credit the fastest and easiest
method. Informal credit was preferred to formal sources even though farmers knew they were
trapped in a cycle of debt if harvests failed. For informal creditors, it was also in their interest
to sustain credit flows year on year and keep interest repayments coming than foreclose on
farmer collateral if they fail to repay (Ramamurthy, 2011; Gerber, 2013). The maintenance of
a large customer base repaying interest was preferred to losing customers, as farmer C61, a
middle aged OBC farmer who last made a profit from Bt cotton three years ago explained:
“We pay the interest we don't have the money to pay the principle. That is what the
brokers want too they don't want you to pay the principle they want you to pay the
interest.” (C61, farmer, 28/6/19)
The prevalence of informal credit is also confirmed in Telangana wide aggregate statistics.
Among small and marginal farmers in Telangana, a national sample survey found that 46% of
the total cotton sold in 2013 was via input dealers (NSSO, 2013c). In addition, informal
moneylenders made up 53% of all credit in rural Telangana in 2013 across low caste OBCs,
ST and SC households (ibid). Finally, the amount of credit invested in informal moneylenders
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for agricultural and other purposes in rural Telangana was between 2-5x higher than in banks
(Kannibiran et al, 2017), indicating the importance of input dealers and informal credit for rural
households in Telangana.
The preference for moneylenders did not take away from the overall indebtedness crisis caused
by Bt cotton, but merely delayed it. As Taylor (2011: p494) explains, the process of smallholder
agricultural intensification saw:
“engrained and hierarchical social relationships on the basis of class, caste and gender,
in which debt plays a key role in structuring the appropriation of agrarian surpluses and
in consolidating relationships of domination.”
As adopting farmers were also from the poorest classes and OBC, SC and ST castes, it
represented a constellation of conjugated oppression of class and caste (Lerche and Shah,
2018). Compared to the original Green Revolution, debt in the Liberalised Green Revolution
with Bt cotton was marketized and unsubsidised and the only route out was by participating in
the market again to get a successful Bt cotton harvest the following year. This was relative to
the original Green Revolution where the government subsidised inputs and targeted favourable
growing environments (Stone, 2019). Therein, the economic losses felt by farmers with Bt
cotton were far more severe and consequential for debt and risk relative to previous generations
in the Green Revolution. The switch to Bt cotton in Kacharam promised higher prices and
higher yields than sorghum, in exchange for higher expenses to cultivate it. Yet now, as farmer
B15 described, with a young family to feed, higher expenses in keeping the household running
and diminishing returns from the high cultivation costs of Bt cotton, farmers today faced the
worst of both worlds:
“Back then the income was low but costs were also low now the income is low and
costs are high”. (B15, farmer, 5/4/19).
Previously, farmers had minimal returns from sorghum but also minimal costs from cultivation,
sourcing seeds, oxen labour and fertiliser from within the farm. With Bt cotton, high input costs
and climatic extremes caused harvest failures and deepened interlocked debt relations in
Telangana (Ramprasad, 2017). Losses from Bt cotton in Kacharam unfolded in the worst way
possible, leaving farmers in a worse position than prior to planting the crop with regards to
trenchant indebtedness problems. The final section of this chapter explains the key role of input
dealers acting as moneylender, salesperson and extension advisor in driving the continued cycle
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of Bt cotton cultivation. This has worsened smallholder farmers’ economic and agroecological
fragility and caused them to survive off the farm.
4.3.4 Input dealer, moneylender, and extension advisor
Market intermediaries such as input dealers have been the key driver of agricultural
commercialisation in the Liberalised Green Revolution, stepping in to fill the government’s
role in credit, seeds, inputs, and extension services. Through the mechanism of interlocked
factor markets, they provide credit for inputs for cash poor smallholders to invest in and a
guaranteed output market by buying the harvest back from the farmer. I claim that local market
intermediaries are the key enabler of agricultural technologies such as Bt cotton to spread to
semi-arid settings, driven by a profit ethos in each of the multiple roles they play as creditor,
input dealer and extension advisor. This follows work by Aga (2018) on input dealers in
Maharashtra, who finds that intermediaries are often petty commodity producers themselves,
existing as one-man enterprises and farming part time. However, the number of intermediaries
in a decentralised manner monopolises their position in rural peripheries as the go-to person
for advice in lieu of government extension officers in the liberalisation era (ibid).
The political economy conditions of deregulated Bt cotton growth in Telangana brought an
explosion of Bt cotton adoption in the last two decades. The deregulated seeds market and
absent role of the government in extension advice however kept farmers reliant on input dealers
for extension advice. The input dealer simultaneously served as input dealer, extension advisor,
harvest buyer and creditor, using all these elements to entrench their own income streams after
introducing Bt cotton in an agroecologically unsuitable Kacharam in the first place
(Ramamurthy, 2011). For example, Chaudhuri (2019) reports in her study of Bt cotton in
Maharashtra that input dealers were incentivised with 10-15% bonuses to meet sales targets
and for promoting specific brands of seeds over others.
The profit ethos was evident in that despite harvest failures from leaving Bt cotton rainfed,
input dealers provided extension advice to farmers to double down on their next seed and input
investments. An exchange with a local input dealer C61 who had been trading for five years in
the nearby town of Devarakonda revealed:
“The farmer [comes to me] four to five times. Once for seeds, twice for fertiliser and
twice for pesticides…there is no such thing as a loss because of the cotton it is due to
rain…it is according to the rain this year it was not good this year is a minus…[we have
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gained expertise] through observation and trial and error. Only if [the farmer] gets a
good yield can we make good business.” (C60, input dealer, 4/6/19)
For the input dealer, farmers’ losses from Bt cotton were due to the variability of the rain, and
not anything wrong on their side. However, the extension advice of the input dealer did not
recommend farmers to irrigate Bt cotton and instead focused on increase input sales. Input
dealers in fact made money despite the yields that farmers achieved, as farmers in Kacharam
purchase inputs annually regardless of a bounty or failure. All this time, input dealers keep
renewing loans and business for another year, getting repeat investments in Bt cotton while the
risks of doing so in a rainfed environment only created uncertainty and further losses from
cultivating the crop. An additional mechanism through which input dealers exercised their
economic control over farmers was the proprietary nature Bt cotton seeds, which meant farmers
could not reuse seeds due to patents (Siddiqui, 2020), having to buy new seeds and pesticide
combinations each year that fit with input dealers’ current sales targets (Aga, 2018). For the
input dealer, this represented a continuous income stream of seed and input sales as seed saving
was not possible by design.
Extension advice was theoretically the job of public extension support workers, but discussions
with farmers revealed that their interactions with extension workers were limited to only a few
days of demonstrations and workshops per year in the village. Farmers lamented the lack of
one-to-one contact time. When they tried to call the extension officer in times of crisis, the line
was always engaged. I too failed to get in contact with the local agricultural extension officer
in the nearby town of Devarakonda via phone or face to face for an interview. This was because
there was just one agricultural officer and a few extension officers for the entire mandal area
of Devarakonda, which covered a jurisdiction of tens of villages. The absence of extension
officers contrasted with input sellers who manned their shops at all hours during the day and
were contactable by phone, making them accessible to farmers. The lack of alternative and
their constant presence made farmers rely on them for each aspect of the input and output
markets for Bt cotton.
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Figure 32 - Local Input Shop in Nalgonda District
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
The culmination of agroecological, climatic, debt and market intermediaries made Bt cotton a
failure as a technology in the long run in Kacharam, as agricultural intensification was applied
in a decontextualised manner to this semi-arid and rainfed village. Moreover, the reliance on
input dealers for extension advice locked farmers further into dependency relationships with
input dealers who sought to maximise input and seed revenues year on year at the expense of
appropriate cropping patterns and irrigation application that could have helped farmers. The
plight caused by Bt cotton was summarised by farmer B15, a young OBC farmer with 1.6 ha
land who took losses of $583 from Bt cotton in 2018. Needing to provide for his young family
and fed up with the repeated failures from Bt cotton investments, he was forced to seek incomes
from outside the farm to keep the household running and repay debts:
“Farming doesn’t bring much return it falls on our heads…in this time whatever work
we are putting in we are not realising the results. For me it is enough to pay the input
costs and my children’s costs that’s it...what can we do? I go driving every day even in
the rainy season…we do agricultural labour [to make ends meet].” (B15, farmer,
5/4/19)
Out of 65 interviews throughout the village, 100% of farmers echoed this sentiment about the
crop they invested their hopes and financial futures in. Farmers in Kacharam, betrayed by
agriculture after twenty years of Bt cotton experimentation in the Liberalised Green
Revolution, could no longer depend on empty promises. Instead of increasing incomes, Bt
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cotton forced farmers away from the farm to make ends meet, far from what agricultural
modernisation proponents predicted (Bergius et al, 2018).
4.4 Conclusion
This chapter has answered the question: “What are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in
the Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana?”. The adoption of Bt cotton came at the critical
juncture of the exhaustion of sorghum as a viable crop amidst rising household expenses in an
increasingly marketized economy. In the process of adoption itself, I showed that Bt cotton
outcomes have not exhibited linear progress, but a chaotic, boom and bust cycle. Farmers
across caste, gender and class lines were trapped into growing an input intensive but rainfed
cash crop prone to the vagaries of a declining monsoon. Moreover, the externalisation of inputs
from the farm to the input shop was entirely privately sourced and financed, unlike previous
Green Revolution iterations in India. The draw of high yields and profits from Bt cotton
prompted farmers to risk their whole livelihood on the cash crop as farmers delved knee deep
into risky high interest debt from input dealers to fund Bt cotton. In turn, Bt cotton’s failures
only made the risk more severe and plunged farmers into heavy losses and debts and doubling
down on Bt cotton in a recurring debt cycle to recoup losses.
To exacerbate the problem of Bt cotton failure, the deregulated input markets, and profit
incentives of input dealers reinforced debt relations for farmers. In the Liberalised Green
Revolution, the rollback of the public sector in extension services, credit and inputs meant the
input dealer was the sole source of information for farmers, creating a conflict of interest where
the input dealer played three roles: the creditor, the salesperson and extension advisor. The
input dealer geared each role he played for profitability at the futility of the farmer growing Bt
cotton in unsuitable semi-arid and rainfed conditions. Losses for 65% of all farmers in 2018
pushed them to make ends meet with non-farm wage labour outside the farm, thereby ending
agriculture as the primary income in Kacharam despite agricultural commercialisation.
Chapter 5 will focus on the adoption and outcomes of tubewell irrigation in Kacharam as part
of the Liberalised Green Revolution, tying the central limiting factor of Bt cotton and tubewell
failure to monsoon variability within complex political economy conditions. Moreover, the
chapter also reveals how despite tubewell adoption farmers keep cultivating Bt cotton in rainfed
conditions and chose to irrigate rice, a household food crop, leaving them unable to recoup
investment costs from both technologies and furthering the reliance on non-farm livelihoods.
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Chapter 5 – How has tubewell irrigation changed the political economy of
agriculture in Telangana?
5.1 Introduction
In Chapter 4 I explored the introduction of Bt cotton in Kacharam and Telangana in the
Liberalised Green Revolution since the 2000s. Bt cotton spread to Telangana via the
liberalisation of the cotton sector by a state government eager to promote private sector
technologies for economic growth. This facilitated the entry of private input dealers who sold,
and marketed inputs on credit and provided extension advice, replacing the role of the public
sector in agriculture. Aspiring towards a high market price crop, farmers in Kacharam took
advantage of the informal credit availability and switched from subsistence crops. In the long
term, Bt cotton failed in Kacharam due to the semi-arid agroecological conditions of erratic
monsoons and by farmers leaving it rainfed, making farmers beholden to creditors and forced
to rely on non-farm incomes to repay debt. Input dealers pushed for the crop to be continually
grown in rainfed conditions, accumulating profits at the expense of farmers. Chapter 5 of this
thesis therein answers the question: “How has tubewell irrigation changed the political
economy of agriculture in Telangana?”.
From the 1970s onwards, groundwater irrigation in India has fundamentally reconfigured the
socio-ecological fabric of the country (Vasavi, 2020). This was epitomised by the tubewell in
the 1990s, an advanced form of groundwater irrigation spread to marginal areas by private
sector irrigation firms. Tubewells extracted water from underground aquifers through
submersible electrical and diesel pumps (MoWR, 2017), piping the water onto fields through
PVC tubes. In creating more absolute irrigated area than public surface irrigation technologies
managed in the preceding 150 years, proponents have referred to it as a “groundwater
revolution” (Shah, 2010).
In particular, the fastest growth in groundwater irrigation has occurred through private sector
led, decentralised and rainfed smallholder farmer dominated adoption of tubewells in the
economic liberalisation era since the 1990s, what this thesis terms the Liberalised Green
Revolution. Groundwater irrigation has been regarded as a crucial technology for improving
crop yields, economic growth and rural poverty reduction for rainfed farmers outside river
command areas (Narayanamoorthy, 2006; 2015). The region of Telangana in the south Indian
state of Andhra Pradesh, the focus of this chapter, was home to centuries of smallholder
subsistence farming, lacking irrigation infrastructure and characterised by harsh climate, erratic
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monsoons, and poor soils (Prasad, 2015). In the 1990s, the newly appointed Chief Minister of
Andhra Pradesh sought to cut back public sector spending, streamline the state’s finances,
including in agriculture, and integrate smallholder farmers into markets for agricultural
commodities via tubewells (Vakulabharanam, 2004).
Cutbacks in public sector credit and irrigation projects and the promotion of private sector
activity in the 1990s (Sahay, 2010) unleashed the competition between thousands of irrigation
firms to maximise irrigation adoption. This brought down prices of tubewells from $10,000 in
1978 to $1,000 in 1999 (Freed and Freed, 2002; Gine et al, 2008). Supported by widely
available informal credit that helped finance groundwater, it allowed smallholder farmers to
realise their dream of growing rice for the household (Alary, 1999). As characterised in Chapter
2 however, the Liberalised Green Revolution proceeded in pockets of liberalisation amidst
continued state intervention (Shah and Harriss-White, 2011). The state government in the
Telangana case study was a prime example of this as even after liberalisation, electricity
subsidies and high minimum support prices for rice continued to appease the groundwater voter
base, incentivising groundwater irrigation adoption to take off further (Taylor, 2013a; Vasavi,
2019; 2020).
Tubewell irrigation in Telangana increased 20x in area from 60,000 ha in 1992 to 1.2 million
hectares by 2018 (DES India, 2019a, b), with small and marginal farmers (<2 ha land) owning
81% of all wells in Telangana (MoWR, 2017). Groundwater growth was also evident in the
explosion in pump set ownership in Telangana from 122,000 in 1972 to 1.76 million in 2011,
an increase of 14x in four decades (Reddy, 2020a). Smallholder rainfed farmers adopted a
double cropped system of rainfed Bt cotton in the monsoon and groundwater irrigated rice in
the dry season (Bhavani et al, 2017). Groundwater expansion was also a realisation of the
Telangana government’s political ambitions to transform the state from an agricultural
backwater to rice bowl of India (News Minute, 2020). This culminated in the state becoming
the biggest dry season rice grower in India in 2020, covering 4 million ha and producing 10
million tonnes (Live Mint, 2020).
In the fieldwork village of Kacharam, most smallholder farmers were rainfed prior to
groundwater irrigation, much like the broader trend in Telangana (Pingle, 2011). Political
economy changes in the 1990s brought tubewells, informal credit and rural electrification
expansion in the village to kick start irrigation adoption. By 2019, 69 out of 105 farming
households (65%) adopted tube well irrigation. Tubewells came to Kacharam in the village in
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conjunction with Bt cotton in the early 2000s. Yet, despite proponents arguing for irrigation to
accelerate Bt cotton yields (Sharma et al, 2018), government policy encouraged farmers to
grow rice with tubewells. Meanwhile, irrigation firms prioritised profitability via sales of
irrigation equipment rather than advising tubewells and Bt cotton to be used together. In a
liberalised environment, they served as salesperson and extension advisors for their
technologies in the absence of the government. This left Bt cotton to be grown rainfed, and
tubewells to irrigate household rice in the dry season, leading to indebtedness from both
technologies in a semi-arid and low and erratic monsoon environment of Kacharam, forcing
farmers to rely on non-farm income to make ends meet.
Tubewell adoption in Telangana and Kacharam occurred in a severely socio-ecologically
constrained environment for agricultural livelihoods. The increasing variability of the monsoon
in recent years exacerbated low yields for rainfed Bt cotton as shown in Chapter 4. With regards
to groundwater, Telangana is mostly underlain by hard rock aquifers, characterised by a
shallow storage, poor infiltration capacity of its laterite soils from rainfall and high density of
tubewells (Jacoby, 2017). To support groundwater expansion, successive Chief Ministers since
1977 (Sishodia et al, 2016) subsidised electricity for farmers, becoming the first state in India
to do so, to appease farmers in Telangana for the historic neglect of the region in irrigation
expansion and river water allocation (Government of India, 2010). After Telangana’s
independence from Andhra Pradesh as a new state in 2014, this was improved upon by the TRS
government since 2018 by expanding free 24x7 electricity for groundwater, the first in India
(Rao, 2018a). This rapidly increased adoption in Telangana but depleted aquifers due to the
zero-marginal cost of extraction of groundwater.
Overall, tubewells failed for most households investing in them in Kacharam. In 2018, the
household survey year, only 10 out of 69 (14%) tubewell irrigated households across all
classes, castes and genders had sufficient groundwater to grow rice successfully in the dry
season. Moreover, 89% of all 215 wells drilled in the village since 2000 failed, leaving only 24
working, a wider pattern also seen in villages elsewhere in Telangana (Rao, 2020). Well
failures became increasingly common due to erratic monsoon rainfall patterns and deepening
of water tables in the village, with farmers increasing their well depths from an average of 81m
in the early 2000s to depths of up to 120m in 2018, well beyond the productive range of hard
rock aquifers in the state (CGWB Telangana, 2017). This race to the bottom for finite
groundwater depleted aquifers quickly after monsoon as the density of tubewells in the village
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increased and free electricity incentivised farmers to run submersible pumps for multiple hours
per day in the search for water (Surendra et al, 2014; Jacoby, 2017).
As with Bt cotton in Chapter 4, tubewells had high fixed costs. When coupled with persistent
failures in an adverse agroecological and aquifer environment, this resulted in farmer
indebtedness. Indebtedness from cumulative tubewell failures over time in Kacharam made
tubewells the most common debt source for farmers at $2,207 per farmer. Installing a tube well
cost up to $1,462 and an additional $439 to $585 for each new well drilled. On average a farmer
in Kacharam made $2,043 annually before all expenses, so tubewells cost 70% of household
income in Kacharam. The price of failure and cumulative debt from moneylenders at 36%
interest increased economic desperation for farmers, trapping them into debt relations with
creditors like with commercial crops (Vasavi, 2020). Rainfed farmers attempted to grow rice
for the household as a symbolism for success to emulate rice growing farmers in the previous
generation. Yet back then, well densities were low, monsoons were more reliable and only 10
irrigated households existed. Now, due to the density of tubewells in Kacharam increasing 7x
relative to 2000, and declining monsoon rainfall, aquifers were depleted quickly and unable to
grow dry season rice.
The aspiration to grow rice in the dry season with tubewells in Kacharam despite
agroecological conditions was also encouraged by private irrigation firms. Due to the
deregulated tubewell economy and absent government, private irrigation firms acted as both
extension advisors and salesperson, like Bt cotton in Chapter 4. Tubewell firms encouraged
drilling at any cost and leaving farmers to irrigate dry season rice for the household versus Bt
cotton, their cash crop. This left their only cash crop to face low yields and harvest failure under
erratic monsoons. These paradoxical set of conditions are also reflected in Telangana, where
only 15% of Bt cotton is irrigated, and in Nalgonda district the figure is less than 1% (DES
Telangana, 2016; DES India, 2019a, b). This exacerbated risks for both Bt cotton and rice for
the household in Kacharam. Tubewells failed in the dry season due to insufficient groundwater
and zero sum well drilling and high densities of tubewells in the village. Furthermore, as
farmers did not use tubewells for Bt cotton, harvest failures from declining monsoons also
occurred frequently. The debts from Bt cotton and tubewells interlocked, burdening farmers
and forcing a reliance on non-farm incomes.
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Unlike in Chapter 4 where Bt cotton was adopted for its high market price, installing tubewells
for household dry season rice had no return on investment. In the Liberalised Green Revolution,
the input dealer, creditor, and irrigation firm all worked in siloes to maximise their own sales,
rather than to increase farmer welfare. From the governments side, irrigation ministers and the
Chief Minister KC Rao encouraged the rapid expansion of tubewells and rice (Live Mint,
2020). On the other hand, groundwater departments were understaffed and had limited
jurisdiction to provide suitable irrigation extension advice to farmers (Pahuja et al, 2010).
At the local level, the rapid expansion of tubewells was encouraged by irrigation firms who
were ever present in nearby towns to Kacharam, providing informal credit to finance the
technology. Farmers, like with Bt cotton in Chapter 4, to take drilling advice from tubewell
firms with no other alternative. Firms acted as both salesperson and irrigation extension
advisors. The culmination of the tubewell political economy in Telangana and Kacharam is
that farmers have become indebted to tubewells and Bt cotton, both unsuitable technologies in
the first place for smallholder intensification in a semi-arid landscape. Losing faith in tubewell
profitability, farmers are anxious to reinvest any further. They now rely more non-farm
incomes to make a living and are encouraging their children to do the same.
The rest of this chapter will be laid out as follows. First, I go detail into how tubewells emerged
in Telangana and Kacharam and the precedent of the Liberalised Green Revolution leading up
to this. Second, I look at the farming logic used with tubewell irrigation and the environmental
backdrop as to why tubewells have not succeeded in increasing economic growth in Kacharam
and Telangana. Third, I examine the role of private irrigation companies acting as extension
providers, and the debt and risk implications from tubewell adoption and use. Finally, I
conclude the chapter by dissecting the consequences of tubewell irrigation on future farming
livelihoods in Kacharam and beyond.
5.2 Tubewell adoption in the Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana
As late as 1991, public sector tank and canal irrigation dominated the irrigation landscape in
Telangana, as tubewells only covered approximately 4% of the net irrigated area (DES
Telangana, 2016). The extent of surface irrigation technologies however were limited to
geographical boundaries near dams, excluding much of Telangana’s farmers (MoWR, 2017).
Dug well irrigation was the only other option for farmers outside of command areas. Powered
by oil/diesel/electric engines, dug wells extracted water in situ from underground aquifers
through drilling into the bedrock and pumping the water to the surface to irrigate a field
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(Vasavi, 2020). Dug wells however were rudimentary technologies, only able to irrigate 2 ha
and drill at 15m depth (MoWR, 2017). Furthermore, their high fixed costs limited adoption to
only the richest classes of farmers (A7, academic, 1/8/18). This was confirmed in surveys by
Deb et al (2002) in Mahbubnagar district, who find that in the early 1990s, only a handful of
the richest farmers could afford dug wells in the village and irrigate rice.
Figure 33- Dried Up Dug Well in Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
This changed in the 1990s because of the Liberalised Green Revolution. The private sectors
share in gross capital formation in agriculture increased from 49% in 1981 to 78% in 2000, as
liberalisation shifted investment in agriculture from public to private (Aggarwal, 2008). The
state government reduced the budgetary allocation to public irrigation from 12% in 1990s to
5% in the 2000s, in order to reduce the public expenditure burden and tighten fiscal spending
(Sahay, 2010). At the same time, the encouragement of market development in irrigation saw
the entry of small-scale entrepreneurs setting up irrigation and drilling firms (Birkenholtz,
2007). Growing demand for groundwater came mainly from smallholder farmers moving to
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commercial agriculture, driven by rising household expenditure and a desire to improve profits
from commercial agriculture as shown in Chapter 4.
A key groundwater technological innovation introduced in 1996 by the Indian pump
manufacturer Texmo was the submersible pump, which powered the tubewell (Taro, 2020).
Submersible pumps were an electric pump technology installed underground and able to pump
water at 20x to 30x the depths of dug wells, extracting water from deep water tables during bad
monsoons (D60, tubewell company, 15/07/19). Attached to PVC tubes, the name tubewell was
given to this overall irrigation system, superseding dugwells as a technology. The most
powerful tubewells could discharge 200-300cm3 per day, 3x the capacity of dugwells and
capable of irrigating 10-15 ha compared to 1-2 ha for dug wells (MoWR, 2017). Private market
competition among irrigation firms and drilling firms in Telangana reduced the cost of
groundwater irrigation to $1,000 (Alary, 1999), a 10x decrease in price compared to the late
1970s (Freed and Freed, 2002). Therefore, tubewells supplanted dug wells not only
technologically but also in affordability.
Figure 34 - Tubewell Irrigation System in Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
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Figure 35 - Submersible Pump for a Tubewell
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Tubewells also entered as a new technology due to the technological exhaustion of dug wells.
Previously, the low density and high cost of dug wells meant farmers could access the
groundwater from a shallow depth for irrigating rice (Deb et al, 2002). Over time however, as
groundwater adoption rapidly increased in Telangana in the 1990s, it also increased the density
of wells drawing upon the same aquifer. Combined with the government’s subsidised
electricity scheme, it depleted dug wells completely, requiring tubewells to drill deeper. In
addition, the erratic monsoons and low storage capacity of hard rock aquifers in Telangana
meant aquifer recharge often was outstripped by the rate of extraction of groundwater due to
high tubewell density (Jacoby, 2017). As a tubewell firm D68 described in a nearby town to
Kacharam:
“They used to drill [15] to [20]m…now wells dried up and people drilled deeper beyond
[20]m in the search for water…. now even smallholder farmers drill before rich farmers
drilled for [tubewells]…farmers [drill] up to [156m].” (D68, tubewell drilling firm,
15/7/19)
The final step of the emergence of tubewells was the concomitant rise of informal credit
provision in Telangana during the Liberalised Green Revolution period. The 1990s saw a
slowdown of public sector credit disbursal in Andhra Pradesh, with the share of smallholder
farmers in total bank credit dispersals dropping from an already low 22% in 1991 to 7% in
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2001 (Pradhan, 2013), relative to their share of informal credit being at 87% (Agarwal, 2008).
This was despite the share of smallholder farmers of all holdings increasing from 43% to 82%
between 1980 and 2000 (DES Telangana, 2016).
Moneylending historically always existed as the norm in Telangana in the village setting
(Venkateshwarlu, 2002). Liberalisation in the 1990s broadened the availability and entry of
new caste entrants, as changing village structures and urbanisation saw traditional
moneylending castes leave villages to cities (Parthasarathy, 2013) (see Figure 13 for a caste
diagram of Telangana). The liberalisation of the credit sector allowed greater opportunities for
new private moneylenders from lower OBC castes in villages and urbanising towns to disburse
credit in high demand from smallholders for new tubewell and cotton technologies
(Vakulabharanam and Motiram, 2014). Despite paying higher interest rates, smallholder
farmers accepted the risk due to the easy access, flexible repayment terms and low collateral
of informal credit, as shown in Chapter 4. This equally crucial but exploitative role of
moneylenders in the Liberalised Green Revolution was explained by interviewee A4, an
agricultural economist:
“But where are they getting the investment for the [tubewells]? The cash needs of the
farmers are small and in lower intervals whereas the banking sector is unable to cater
to such kind of needs. [The]…moneylender supports them in a time of need so…of
course it was a high interest [loan] which would involve exploiting also… but we
should not throw out the baby with the bathwater as the alternative is nobody.” (A4,
academic, 23/8/18)
The liberalisation of the credit sector allowed greater opportunities for new private
moneylenders in Telangana to take advantage of the burgeoning demand for tubewells. The
untapped market was the millions of subsistence rainfed smallholder farmers who aspired to
adopt tubewell irrigation to grow rice for the household (Alary, 1999).
Declining prices of tubewells, marketing by irrigation firms and increased availability of
informal credit provision in rural Telangana in the 1990s opened up tubewell adoption to
smallholder farmers. Figures 36 and 37 below show the growth in tubewell irrigation at both
the Telangana and Nalgonda level. In Telangana, tubewells contributed to <5% of the net
irrigated area at 100,000 ha as late as the 1990s, when dug well irrigation dominated at almost
43% (DES Andhra Pradesh, 2006). Tubewells quickly took off in the 1990s however,
accelerating further in the 2000s and reaching nearly 1.2 million hectares in 2018, making up
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50% of the total net irrigated area (DES India, 2019a, b). In Nalgonda, tubewells mirrored the
state-wide trend, increasing from less than 2,000 ha to over 190,000 ha by 2018, or 59% of the
net irrigated area (ibid).
Figure 36 - Telangana Irrigation Area by Source 1955-2018
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006); DES Telangana (2016); DES India (2019a, b)
Figure 37 - Nalgonda Irrigation Area by Source 1955-2018
Source: DES Andhra Pradesh (2006); DES Telangana (2016); DES India (2019a, b)
0
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Tube Wells Dug Wells
Other Sources
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Tanks Project Canals Tube Wells
Dug Wells Other Sources
150
While tubewells increased, other types of irrigation in Telangana and Nalgonda decreased or
stagnated in this period, meaning that tubewell irrigation singlehandedly contributed to a total
increase in net irrigated area from 30% in the 1990s to almost 50% by 2018 (DES India, 2019a,
b). Another indicator of tubewell growth is the increase in pump sets ownership in Telangana
and Nalgonda. In Telangana, pump sets increased from 122,000 in 1972 to 1.76 million in
2011, an increase of 14x. In Nalgonda, pump sets increased 14x from 18,000 in 1972 to 256,000
in 2011 (Reddy, 2020a). In addition, almost 80% of tubewells in Telangana were used as the
sole irrigation type outside of canal command areas, meaning that most farmers adopting them
were previously rainfed or only had access to groundwater irrigation (MoWR, 2017). Finally,
81% of all the tubewells in Telangana in 2014 were owned and operated by smallholder farmers
owning <2ha, confirming them as the dominant drivers of tubewell growth (ibid). The next
section shows the process of tubewell adoption in Kacharam.
5.2.1 The entry of tubewell irrigation in Kacharam
Prior to tubewells, Kacharam was largely a rainfed village, with farmers growing sorghum,
millets, or castor in the monsoon. Kacharam was more than 50km away from the nearest canal
command area, the Nagarjuna Sagar dam, hence was excluded from surface irrigation. For the
10 families that could afford irrigation, private dug wells were used to irrigate rice for
household consumption in the dry season. By the end of the 1990s, many dug wells in
Kacharam dried out due to deepening water tables because of erratic monsoons and increase in
tubewell density (Shashikala, 2015). Farmer D67, an elderly ST farmer cultivating 1.5 ha,
described the transition her family made to tubewells owing to the exhaustion of dug wells:
“We used to have a [dug] well system….then there was no water in the well. We didn’t
have the energy [to restore it] plus everyone was installing [tubewells] at the time we
saw each other and installed it [to grow rice].” (D67, farmer, 25/6/19)
Seeing other farmers successfully growing rice with tubewells, the incentive to adopt the latter
was also created following her dug well drying up, as she had the means to finance it with
informal credit. The final step to bring tubewells into Kacharam was rural electrification.
Kacharam saw a delay in tubewell adoption relative to Telangana as the village was not
electrified fully until 1999/2000 (D1, farmer, 27/6/19). Electricity is essential for tubewells as
92% of tubewells in Telangana run on electric submersible pumps (MoWR, 2017). With the
entry of tubewell irrigation, emulating the dug well irrigated rice growing households of
previous generations was finally possible.
151
By 2019, tubewells were adopted by 69 out of 105 (66%) of farming households, from 0
households in 2000. The end goal of the tubewell irrigation was to grow rice, bringing food
security and a cultural symbolism of material success. As Alary (1999: p1402-1404) explains
for Mahabubnagar district in Telangana:
“From the time it is possible, the farmers resort to rice cultivation… not only does rice
constitute the staple diet in all meals during the day, it becomes symbolic also of a
certain economic status. In the non-irrigated zone, presence or absence of a well
conditions choice of crops. The moment a farmer can afford a well, he takes up rice
cultivation.”
As Fishman et al (2011) explain, the pursuit of tubewell irrigation for rice consumption in
Telangana was also a way to emulate and compete with the canal irrigated regions of coastal
Andhra Pradesh that benefited from a Green Revolution in rice in the 1960s. Using tubewells
to overcome Telangana’s difficult agroecological soil, climate and rainfall conditions,
Telangana was able to compete with coastal Andhra in rice production. In recent years, the free
24/7 electricity scheme passed by the Telangana government after independence from Andhra
Pradesh further encouraged farmers to attempt rice cultivation in the dry season with tubewells
(Rao, 2018a). This was also a statement for the Chief Minister of Telangana KC Rao for the
state to overcome its historic marginalisation in agriculture within Andhra Pradesh and
compete in rice production. This reached its culmination in 2020, as the Live Mint (2020: p1)
reported:
“Thanks to…the 24x7 electricity supply, India’s youngest state, once described as the
most backward and parched, is on the way to emerge as the new rice bowl of India.
With record cultivation of paddy on nearly [4m ha] during the ongoing [dry] season,
the state expects a yield of more than [10m tonnes], the highest for the season since the
creation of the state six years ago. Agriculture Minister S Niranjan Reddy believes that
the state will emerge as the rice bowl of India in three years.”
The aspirations of farmers in Kacharam to grow irrigated rice for the household was made
possible with the rapid expansion of tubewells since the 1990s. Supported by private irrigation
firms, informal credit, and the larger incentives and political goals of the Telangana
government, tubewells were therefore both a micro and macro scale desire within Kacharam
and Telangana. Through tubewell irrigation, Telangana was an example of what Sultana (2013:
p343) calls “technonatures”, the process by which water technologies reflect political aims.
152
The growth of tubewell irrigation to 69 out of 105 households for dry season rice consumption
in Kacharam matched the overall trends at both the Nalgonda district level and Telangana level,
as Figures 38 and 39 show below. Dry season rice increased in absolute terms from 1998-2019
in both Telangana and Nalgonda. In Telangana, the percentage share of dry season rice
increased from 375,000 ha (29%) in 1999 to a peak of almost 1 million ha (52%) of total rice
area in 2016 (DES India, 2019a, b). In Nalgonda, dry season rice area increased from 63,000
ha in 1999 (26%) of total rice area to 232,000 ha (58%) in 2017 (ibid). Given that tubewells
were the only irrigation type to increase in area in this period as shown earlier in Figure 37,
this means that most of the dry season rice was driven by the increased adoption in tubewells.
Figure 38 - Telangana Dry Season Rice Area 1998-2019
Source: DES India (2019a, b)
0
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Total Rice Area Telangana
153
Figure 39 - Nalgonda Dry Season Rice Area 1998-2019
Source: DES India (2019a, b)
This section has shown that tubewell adoption fundamentally reshaped Kacharam and
Telangana. The culmination of a superior technology via submersible pumps, private market
competition and price reduction by irrigation firms, energy subsidies and increased availability
of credit made it possible for millions of smallholder rainfed farmers to adopt tubewells.
Tubewells outstripped all other irrigation types in Telangana, single handedly increasing the
net irrigated area from the 1990s onwards. It also contributed to the phenomenon of dry season
rice growth. In Kacharam, initially, only 10 households out of 105 could afford irrigation with
dugwells, but in the 2019, 69 out of 105 farmers adopted tubewell irrigation, fulfilling their
desire to grow rice for the household. The culture of dry season rice was also a factor of farmers
wanting to emulate dug well farmers in the previous generation. At a wider policy level, the
Telangana government through successive subsidy schemes promoted the adoption of
tubewells and rice cultivation in the dry season to make the state a rice growing powerhouse in
India.
The next section discusses the long-term implications and outcomes for tubewell adopting
households in Kacharam.
0
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154
5.2.2 The political economy of tubewell failure in Kacharam and Telangana
This section argues that the Liberalised Green Revolution was tremendously successful in
pushing tubewell adoption in Kacharam. Yet, agroecological conditions and aquifer
characteristics combined with high debt driven tubewell investments created tubewell failure
in Kacharam. The key reason of failure was the increased tubewell densities that propagated
“competitive well deepening” (Shah, 2010). Upon installing tubewells, farmers in Kacharam
initially enjoyed high yields rice for the household. Within five years however, tubewells failed
persistently for farmers across all castes, classes, and genders, with only 10 households (14%)
in 2019 having enough water in the tubewell to grow rice successfully until harvest. In total,
215 tubewells were drilled since 2000 but only 24 worked as of 2019, an 89% failure rate.
Tubewells also became the most common source of debt for farmers in Kacharam, with 29%
of farmers citing it as their biggest debt at an average of $2,207. Bringing no economic returns,
however, it forced farmers to abandon the technology and seek incomes from non-farm
livelihoods to repay their debts.
Farmers irrigated rice, a household food crop, over Bt cotton, the main cash crop for 100% of
the 105 farming households in Kacharam. This left Bt cotton prone to the monsoon and harvest
failures as shown in Chapter 4. Cotton and tubewell irrigation were the two flagship Liberalised
Green Revolution technologies but were used seperately. This paradoxical irrigation choice
was also the norm in Telangana and Nalgonda district, as only 15% and 1% of Bt cotton area
in 2019 was irrigated respectively (DES Telangana, 2016; DES India, 2019a, b).
In addition to this, the adoption of tubewells in Kacharam and Telangana occurred in a harsh
environment for agrarian livelihoods, characterised by variable monsoons, low average
rainfall, low infiltration capacity soil and high evapotranspiration and runoff rates. Nalgonda
district has a low average monsoon rainfall of 474mm, the lowest district average in Telangana
(DES Andhra Pradesh, 2006; CGWB Telangana, 2019). In addition, 85% of Telangana is
underlain by hard rock aquifers (CGWB Telangana, 2019). Hard rock aquifers have low storage
capacity and porosity, with groundwater unevenly spread between interstitial cracks in the rock
(Hora et al, 2019). Almost 67% of groundwater recharge comes from the monsoon in hard rock
aquifers (Asoka et al, 2018), but as Chapter 4 showed, monsoons became more variable in
recent years, driving droughts and harvest failures. Compounding the problem was the fact that
less than 4-10% of rainfall in the monsoon reached the aquifer due to the poor laterite red soil
155
infiltration capacity, with the rest being lost to surface runoff and evapotranspiration (Kumar
et al, 2011).
The dense rock substrata and low storage capacity also made it risky and expensive to drill
into, often requiring multiple drill attempts for the farmer to find water in a narrow band of
porous rock (Marechal, 2010). The cost of tubewells in Kacharam were up to $1,462 for the
first installation and a further $485-$539 for each drill attempt (D60, tubewell firm, 15/7/19),
making up more than 70% of the annual income of farmers in Kacharam. This figure is similar
elsewhere in Telangana too (Sishodia et al, 2017). In addition, the deeper the well was drilled,
the more expensive it became. Finally, the tubewells were almost entirely financed by informal
credit in Kacharam, where farmers paid up to 36% interest per year on top of the tubewell cost.
As Bt cotton, the main cash crop, was left rainfed in the face of a declining monsoon over time,
there was little recourse to repay the moneylender for either tubewell or Bt cotton debts.
In Kacharam, the rapid adoption of tubewell irrigation rapidly increased the density of
tubewells all drawing from the same aquifer source in the village, with each farmer drilling on
average of 93m and as deep as 130m. The total number of wells drilled in Kacharam since 2000
were 215, spread across 69 households. Combined with the factors above, it meant groundwater
reserves were quickly depleted before they could recharge from the monsoon (Jacoby, 2017).
Table 7 shows how tubewell irrigation failed across all categories of class, caste and gender of
the households that adopted it. By July 2019, the success rate for a tubewell was 11% to 33%
across all categories, roughly translating to 7-9 out of every 10 tubewells in Kacharam failing.
Table 7 - Tubewell Outcomes in Kacharam
Category
Total
Farming
Households
Irrigated
Households
Working
Irrigated
(%)
Failed
Irrigated
(%)
Total
Drill
Attempts
Success
Rate
(%)
All Farmers 105 69 24 (35) 45 (65) 215 11
OBC 74 49 16 (33) 33 (66) 129 12
SC 23 14 6 (43) 8 (57) 57 11
ST 8 6 2 (33) 4 (67) 29 7
Widow 11 2 1 (50) 1 (50) 3 33
Non-Widow 94 67 23 (34) 44 (66) 212 11
Marginal (<1 ha) 33 17 1 (6) 16 (94) 39 3
Small (1-2 ha) 56 40 18 (45) 22 (55) 119 15
Medium (>2-5ha) 16 12 5 (42) 7 (58) 57 9
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
156
Rainfall in semi-arid Kacharam was always unstable and low in quantity, reliant on the erratic
monsoon. Yet as Chapter 4 showed, even these conditions worsened over time. The
intensification of tubewells in Kacharam therefore only made an already bad situation worse,
depleting aquifers faster than they could be recharged under the monsoon. Telangana tried to
replicate the success of rice cultivation as coastal Andhra Pradesh enjoyed in the 1960s, but
without the geographic suitability or advantage to benefit from the technologies in a sustainable
manner (Government of India, 2010). In fact, as far back as the 1960s, an economic survey
report deemed Telangana unsuitable for widespread groundwater irrigation due to its
hydrogeology (Rao, 2014).
The low storage and poor recharge capability of laterite soils exacerbated the demand on the
aquifer from tubewell densities increasing in the village (Ahmed et al, 2008). More farmers
drilling wells and extracting water from the same aquifer increased competition amongst the
farmers. In a survey of 144 villages in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, Jacoby (2017: p13-14)
found:
“[Tubewell] clustering leads to well interference. In Andhra Pradesh, pumps are run
continuously throughout the dry season for the hours during which electricity is
available. When a pair of nearby submersible pumps run in tandem, the combined
drawdown of the local water table is greater, and the combined discharge of the pumps
correspondingly much less…a cluster of [tubewells] in short, creates a localised
depression of the water table, which is increasing in [tubewell] density.”
Relative to the era of dug wells in the village previously where 10 dug wells were spread across
105 households and 120 ha of cropping area, the tubewell era saw 69 households adopting and
drilling 215 powerful submersible pump powered wells (MoWR, 2017). The 7x increase in
density of wells in the village drove tubewell failures, leaving them unable to grow rice or
repay tubewell investments.
157
The nexus of environmental and social factors deepened farmers’ economic problems rather
than solve them. Farmer D3, an OBC middle aged female owning 1.2 ha land, invested in four
failed tubewells with her husband, spending over $2,000 in pump, drilling, pipe, and
installation costs, and deepening her wells from 40m to 50m, but to no avail:
“[The dug well] worked quite well we planted rice. This was 15 to 20 years
ago….[After drilling for the new tubewell] we grew rice for one year that was food for
the household… the [tubewell] dried up over time our fields dried up and so did our
yields. The neighbours couldn’t help me out as they don’t have water either…we are
living in bad times sir we have no money.” (D3, farmer, 1/7/19)
Relative to the pre-tubewell era where the low number of groundwater users could access water
for rice, the increase in density with the finite groundwater source made rice irrigation at scale
infeasible in Kacharam. This is further underlined by Anupoju and Kambhammetu (2020), who
describe that water requirements for rice alone in India are more than 50% of the total annual
groundwater supply available. This outlines the infeasibility of farmers to grow rice, especially
in the dry season where there is no rainfall to recharge aquifers. Moreover, as Sidhu et al (2020:
p24-25) note, free electricity incentivises farmers to pump as much as possible:
“Farmers paying flat charges face no marginal cost of pumping groundwater (Scott &
Shah, 2004). As a result, flat-tariffed regions have witnessed rapid groundwater
depletion and wasteful power consumption in agriculture. Rice crop needs to be
irrigated approximately 20 times over a season, so some farmers err on the side of
caution and keep their pumps running continuously during the sowing days to keep
fields inundated.”
Therein, rice cultivation in Kacharam was never a feasibility due to hydrogeology and the water
demands from the crop. A secondary factor adding to the problem of well density was the
declining monsoon rainfall, as shown in Chapter 4. In a village level sample survey in
Kacharam, rainfall was consistently cited as the biggest problem facing farmers by 100% of
105 household respondents in Kacharam. Under erratic monsoons, the combination of lower
rainfall and more farmers attempting to draw on the limited groundwater lowered the water
table, drying out tubewells and incurring heavy losses for the farmers from Bt cotton too.
Furthermore, tubewells in Kacharam were the singular source of irrigation used in the village.
Similarly, a Telangana-wide irrigation census found that 80% of tubewells were installed
outside of canal command areas and were the sole source of irrigation for farmers. This meant
158
there were no other supplemental sources of irrigation to recharge groundwater tables (Pingle,
2011; MoWR, 2017). Farmer B19, an elderly ST farmer, drilled 12 times for tubewells, but all
of them dried up. Compared to his parent’s generation where they could grow seven food crops
for the household under rainfed conditions, now neither rainfed nor irrigating crops worked:
“We drilled 12 borewells and had a debt of [$3,000] …[there is] no water…where is
[our parent’s] time and where is ours. They grew things well whatever they planted it
grew fully. Now it rains for one month and [then] does not. It falls a little bit then dries
up. The field of rice dries up because there is no water in the [tubewell].” (B19, farmer,
2/4/19)
The phenomenon of increasing well failures and tubewell densities in semi-arid and hard rock
areas was also observed elsewhere in Telangana, confirming findings in Kacharam. For
example, Taylor (2013a) reported how in Medak district, 244 out of 250 wells failed in 2009
due to the lowering of the groundwater table. Similarly, in Nalgonda district, one village
Musapally drilled 6,000 borewells over several years, investing $1.2 million, but 85% of the
wells failed over time (ibid).
Furthermore, in a longitudinal village study of two villages in Mahbubnagar district between
1989 and 2013, farmers also described reduced rainfall in the monsoon and rising tubewell
densities (Rao and Bhattarai, 2014). In addition, they found that previous dug well and tank
irrigation systems for rice dried out completely, with the success rate of drilling wells only at
20-25%. By 2013, groundwater depletion rendered farmers unable to extract water even with
more powerful pumps and by drilling over 150m (ibid). In Kacharam, tubewells saw a rapid
adoption rate with 69 out of 105 farming households adopting tubewells within 20 years of its
introduction, drilling 215 wells in total. However, tubewells did not improve farmer outcomes
in the long term, with 89% of all tubewells drilled having failed. In the rare cases tubewells did
work, they were used for growing rice, a household food crop and not for Bt cotton, their main
cash crop, so the farmer was unable to repay either informal debt in tubewells or Bt cotton.
To answer why this has taken place, the next section investigates the role of private irrigation
firms as salesperson and extension advisor in pushing tubewells to rainfed farmers in a semi-
arid Telangana. Simultaneously, the state government, with their populist policies and absence
in providing irrigation extension advice, exacerbated failures from tubewells, increasing debts
and pushing farmers off the farm to cover losses from failed Liberalised Green Revolution
technologies.
159
5.2.3 Intermediaries and governments as key drivers of tubewell failure
A major component of tubewell growth in the Liberalised Green Revolution in Telangana were
private irrigation firms that sold the technology and helped spread its adoption. The explosion
of competing private firms in the 1990s in Telangana fostered innovation by introducing more
powerful submersible pumps and lowering tubewell prices through market competition. Yet
private irrigation firms were largely unregulated, which also created predatory behaviour. In a
competitive environment where tubewells were taking off and millions of rainfed farmers were
adopting this technology, private firms maximised tubewell adoption at any cost to any farmer
to purchase a tubewell via accessing informal credit. Moreover, tubewell companies had no
scientific background, but farmers relied on their authority for tubewell extension advice. In
this unregulated tubewell political economy, the absence of government departments in
regulating or advising on irrigation management gave farmers no alternative for extension
advice. This section provides original research into the nature of private irrigation firms in the
tubewell economy. It is a topic that has remained underexplored in the literature in India except
for Birkenholtz (2007) in Rajasthan.
Private irrigation firms played a dual role as extension advisor and salesperson, creating a
conflict of interest much like input dealers with Bt cotton in Chapter 4. This partially helps
explain the paradox of why farmers do not irrigate Bt cotton and instead irrigate dry season
rice in Kacharam, aggravating risk and debt problems in an extreme agroecological and
hydrogeological environment. Extension advice from tubewell firms to keep drilling more and
deeper wells after well failure kept farmers drilling in desperation for groundwater, even when
this was beyond the aquifer depth that hydrologists in Telangana recommended. A plethora of
moneylenders financing this endeavour also kept farmers drilling.
At the same time in the Liberalised Green Revolution, the Telangana government on the one
hand was absent in providing suitable cropping pattern and irrigation management extension
advice for tubewells, leaving a situation of Bt cotton to be rainfed and tubewells left to irrigate
rice. On the other hand, the Telangana government made tubewell failure worse through
encouragement of rainfed Bt cotton and dry season rice (Live Mint, 2020). Although in recent
years the government has expanded canal and tank irrigation schemes (Verma and Shah, 2019),
groundwater dependence is still dominant in Telangana.
160
Erratic monsoons, persistent well failures, climbing debts and immiserating Bt cotton losses in
Kacharam have driven farmers into crisis through the Liberalised Green Revolution. The
burden of risk and financial exhaustion of repeated tubewell failures have now made farmers
reticent to drill any further as they are not confident in the technology to deliver. Failures from
both technologies have also meant farming livelihoods are no longer sustainable in Kacharam.
Instead of irrigation and high value crops boosting economic growth and enabling the structural
transformation of the economy out of agriculture (Van Der Ploeg, 2014), farmers have been
forced out of agriculture because of agricultural intensification. This final section therefore
answers how and why tubewell irrigation has failed, and what lies ahead for the farmers in
Kacharam.
5.2.4 The role of private firms and governments in tubewell failure in Kacharam
A crucial aspect of aquifer depletion across all categories of farmers in Kacharam and
Telangana was the zero-sum drilling environment between farmers. This increased tubewell
densities and depleted aquifers in a water stressed and climatically adverse environment.
Importantly however, the tubewell political economy also had a key role in exacerbating
tubewell failure. The rapid growth through the 1990s of tubewells from 4% to 50% of the net
irrigated area in Telangana by 2019 (DES Telangana, 2016; DES India, 2019a, b) was in part
due to the Telangana government’s role in encouraging tubewell expansion through energy
subsidies. Yet, at the same time, groundwater department hydrogeologists were understaffed
and underfunded, playing a limited role in suggesting ameliorative policies for irrigation
management compared to irrigation ministers who promoted tubewell expansion (Pahuja et al,
2010). This left farmers to rely on private irrigation providers who were readily available and
contactable by phone and in shops in nearby towns for advice on well depth, installation and
well drilling.
Competition amongst private irrigation firms prioritised maximising profits via encouraging
farmers to drill numerous wells, rather than to irrigate Bt cotton or using more efficient
technologies such as drip irrigation (Sharma et al, 2018), both of which are shown to increase
Bt cotton yields and incomes (Shah, 2011). These predatory forces in the Liberalised Green
Revolution were consequential, as tubewells were adopted by mostly poor farmers in the most
marginal growing and aquifer environments. The vested interest in these private irrigation
providers in keeping business flowing meant farmers were encouraged to drill again or deepen
wells after each failure.
161
Due to informal credit availability farmers doubled down on tubewell drilling despite multiple
failures. Each well failure compounded the debt of the farmers, and with farmers’ decision to
irrigate rice and leave Bt cotton rainfed, it meant no way to pay the debt back. The initial cost
of a tubewell was up to $1,462, with additional wells costing $439 to $585 versus an average
farmer’s total household income of $2,043 in Kacharam. Farmers bore the brunt of costs from
tubewell failure to the benefit of private irrigation firms, plunging their farming livelihoods
into further economic crisis on top of Bt cotton cultivation problems in rainfed conditions as
Chapter 4 showed. In a survey conducted with 72 farming households in Kacharam, tubewells
were the most common source of debt per household at 29% of the sampled households, an
average debt of $2,207. In addition, debts from inputs for Bt cotton came to $2,238, meaning
debts from Liberalised Green Revolution technologies made up 47% of debts in Kacharam.
This is shown in Figure 40 below. Adopting the technologies in unsuitable agroecological and
aquifer conditions plus using the technologies separately mutually reinforced indebtedness
from both.
Figure 40 - Main Debt Sources in Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
162
Moreover, the figure of $2,207 for tubewell debt was only the average across farmers in
Kacharam. Farmer D57, an elderly ST farmer, drilled 12 tubewells with no success over the
course of five years, losing over $5,000:
“I drilled 12 [times] for wells…one works if the monsoon is good but that too doesn’t
work now…. each [tubewell] cost [$438]….in total 6 failed at the beginning the others
worked a few years…. [I started drilling] 5 to 6 years ago then I kept drilling and it has
come to 12…[the rice] was just for the household. The debts were not touched.” (D57,
farmer, 11/7/19)
The desperation not finding any water spurred him to drill over a five to six year period, taking
out informal loans each time to cover the costs of drilling but to no avail. Private irrigation
firms played a key role in perpetuating this trend of drilling multiple times for tubewells, as
their business came from demand for their services. Regardless of wells failing repeatedly,
private irrigation firms benefited each time the farmer drilled. In fact, it was more profitable
for farmers wells to fail for the irrigation firm, as it meant repeat business, compared to a
working tubewell. This made drilling for tubewells in an adverse semi-arid and hard rock
aquifer environment more profitable for irrigation firms. Yet, when asked about their role in
encouraging farmers to drill without consideration to the sunk costs and wasted cropping
patterns, interviewee D68, an owner of a tubewell firm, answered:
“We just drill where they point out. If it fails or not that is not down to us…” (D68,
tubewell drilling firm, 15/7/19)
This implied that the desire to drill for tubewells came entirely from the farmer. If farmers
called for their services, they could not refuse, and as they drill where the farmer asks, they are
not responsible for what happens next. However, tubewell firms were found from numerous
interviews in Kacharam and Telangana to actively pursue farmers in the search for repeat
customers, calling to advertise their services to rainfed farmers and farmers with failed wells.
This is confirmed by an interviewee A1, an agricultural economist, who observed:
“…[T]his is all private markets…this [drilling] fellow will contact local people [in the]
village so the village will have a contact person that person will arrange the market.”
(A1, agricultural economist, 30/7/18)
163
The circular reasoning offered by the irrigation firm that the demand came solely from farmers
belies interviews with farmers and academics who felt that farmers were chased up and targeted
by private firms to buy their services. In nearby towns to Kacharam, I observed tubewell shops
and drilling machines were everywhere, ready to be deployed. Tubewell companies were a
constant presence, as I counted 10 shops within a 3km radius in a town near Devarakonda.
Even as farmers’ crops and tubewells fail and dry out due to erratic monsoons and zero-sum
drilling, tubewell companies have continued to receive demand for wells as they take advantage
of the farmers’ desperation to keep coming back to them, only to fall deeper into debts. Unlike
with Bt cotton moreover where it had a market price, tubewells were a sunk cost without a
return.
Figure 41 - A Tubewell Drilling Rig in Mallepally, a Nearby Town to Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
164
Figure 42 - Tubewell Shops in Towns Near Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Figure 43 - Tubewell Shops in Towns Near Kacharam 2
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
165
Tubewell firms have also widened their business portfolios in recent years. In view of multiple
drilling attempts becoming cost prohibitive for farmers, tubewell companies also offered
farmers to deepen their existing wells. This mirrored input firms with Bt cotton promoting
different seed varieties and input combinations with farmers year on year, gearing each part of
their extension advisor and salesperson position towards maximising revenues and opening
new income streams (Aga, 2018; 2019). Deepening wells cost $219 to $292 per well; a cheaper
option compared to drilling new wells for $439 to $585. Farmer D41, a SC female widow with
1 ha land could not afford to drill new wells on the farm, failing with multiple attempts. So,
deepening the well was a cheaper option:
“We had one [working tubewell] but it doesn’t work anymore. That [well] dried up too.
Even if it rains it will not come back now, they said there was no more water left in
there after we deepened it again. [So] we spent another [$292] we deepened it another
3m.” (D41, farmer, 4/7/19)
Deepening wells, it turns out, is another sales avenue for private firms, but to no help for the
farmer, as well deepening is still prone to failure, costing $292, as the tubewell densities remain
high. Table 8 shows the increasing well depths in Kacharam, with the expectation from farmers
that the deeper you drill the better chance you will find water amidst deepening groundwater
tables. It shows that original drill depths ranged from 75m to 99m when first installed in the
early 2000s and increased for every category of farm household to between 80m and 107m in
2019.
Table 8 - Tubewell Deepening
Category Irrigated
Households
Tubewell
Original Depth
(m)
Tubewell Current
Depth (m)
All Farmers 69 81 86
OBC 49 75 80
SC 14 93 99
ST 6 99 107
Widow 2 84 84
Non-Widow 67 81 86
Marginal (<1 ha) 17 78 80
Small (1-2) 40 79 84
Medium (>2-5 ha) 12 93 99
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
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In interviews with tubewell drillers, they once again pointed to the erratic monsoon as the
necessity for farmers to deepen their wells, and hence the increasing demand for tubewell
deepening. In one interview with a farmer, they revealed that private irrigation firms
recommended him to deepen his wells even though they dried up 5 years ago (D7 farmer,
interview, 1/7/19). Therefore, tubewell drillers push farmers to deepen their wells as an
additional revenue stream on top of drilling services. The trend of deepening wells was also
evident in other parts of Telangana. In work by Surendra et al (2014) in Mahbubnagar district,
farmers drilled progressively deeper wells between 2000 and 2014, increasing the depths of
wells from 30m to 116m in this time.
Figure 44 - A Price List for Tubewells by Depth
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Moreover, this advice to drill deeper for higher chance of groundwater access contradicts how
hard rock aquifers are understood by hydrologists. In hard rock aquifers, water is found in pores
between the rock spaces of an aquifer, so is highly localised and variable in depth (Bassi et al,
2008). As Fishman et al (2011) explain in their survey of villages in Telangana, farmers may
strike water at a much lower depth than other farmers, but this is a function of luck, of hitting
water at a particular depth, not of how deep wells are.
167
Marechal (2010: p289) describes how drilling deeper with existing wells is akin to gambling:
“Once started, it is difficult to decide to stop drilling if the well is dry because the driller
thinks that expected water-bearing structure could be a few meters away. This is similar
to the compulsive gambler who needs, after losing, to gamble again to recover his
losses…[Yet] this escalation of commitment for drilling deeper and deeper may be
encouraged by drilling companies as the potential money gains are increased.”
Indeed, hydrogeological surveys by the CGWB in Telangana found that most of the available
groundwater in Nalgonda district was present in between 40m-80m depths (CGWB Telangana,
2017). In Kacharam, the minimum depth drilled was 75m, almost as high as the maximum
recommended depth by the CGWB at 80m. Furthermore, in a Telangana irrigation census in
2014, 27% of all tubewells were found to be over 70m, meaning this belief of drilling deeper
to find water is pervasive beyond Kacharam (MoWR, 2017). The reality, as Jacoby (2017)
explains, is that for every 10m increase in well depth, drilling costs increase by 6% and pump
costs by 9%, due to the greater time and energy expended to drill. This indicates that the
unregulated nature of tubewell drilling in Kacharam is a profitable business model for the
tubewell firm at the detriment of farmer welfare and absence of the government in the tubewell
political economy.
The density of deep tubewells in Telangana is also shown below by Rajan et al (2020: p277)
in Figure 45, who find that at an all-India level, Telangana has some of the highest densities of
tubewells drilled over 70m, mirroring the trends in Kacharam of drilling firms encouraging
well drilling beyond the recommended depths by the CGWB expected to yield water.
168
Figure 45 - Deep Tubewell Density Map of India
Source: Rajan et al (2020: p277)
During fieldwork, I found the CGWB was absent for farmers to contact if they needed advice.
Located in Nalgonda city, almost 60km from Kacharam, 80% of the 65 farmers interviewed in
Kacharam had never heard of the CGWB nor did they feel they could contact them when they
needed to. In addition, the Telangana state government assigns just one hydrogeologist per
district, a total of 31 hydrogeologists for the 2.4 million wells drilled in Telangana. Giving a
deeper insight into groundwater departments in Andhra Pradesh, Pahuja et al (2010: p50-51)
summarise:
“Even in states such as Andhra Pradesh and Maharashtra, which boast the best
groundwater departments in the country, staffing strength and profiles are grossly
inadequate compared to what is needed. Groundwater organizations are generally
located at a relatively low level in the state hierarchy, often in the departments whose
interest is focused on one of the main water uses, for example irrigation or water supply.
The structure, functioning, and staffing of groundwater agencies conform primarily to
the long-outdated mandate of surveying and developing the groundwater resource, and
are not oriented to paying any attention to the users and the socioeconomic dimensions
of groundwater use.”
169
Irrigation firms monopolised extension services for tubewells in the scenario of absent
governments. The interests of the tubewell firms were driven by a vested interest to sell more
pumps and drill more wells and provide advice that was antithetical to official hydrogeological
guidance. Regardless of success or failure, the demand for their services continues unabated
despite the 89% failure rate of all tubewells in Kacharam. Concurrently, however, while being
absent in regulation or extension services, the Telangana government also continues long-
standing efforts to appease farming voting blocs through energy subsidies and encourage
tubewell expansion.
Costing the Telangana government $541 million in covering costs of the scheme in 2018-19,
the budget estimate for electricity subsidies in 2020-21 has doubled to $1 billion (Telangana
Today, 2020). Rajan et al (2020) find that the deepest tubewells and most overexploited
aquifers in India are in nine states, of which Telangana is one, where the electricity is the
cheapest for the farmer via subsidies. Moreover, they find that within the nine worst
groundwater depleted states, 27 districts are the most overexploited, which includes Nalgonda
and every other district in Telangana. Figure 46 below by Rajan et al (2020: p268) shows that
Telangana has the cheapest electricity costs per unit for groundwater in India in green at $0-5
along with the rest of the nine other groundwater depleted states in India.
170
Figure 46 - Groundwater Electricity Costs by State in India
Source: Rajan et al (2020: p268)
India wide, electricity subsidies have also increased in real terms from $4 billion to $10 billion
between 2000 and 2016 (OECD, 2018), most prominent in the states that also face severe
groundwater exploitation problems (Sidhu et al, 2020). On the ground consequences in villages
like Kacharam is testament to this, the long-term well failure and immiseration of farmer
livelihoods, which has increased indebtedness and exacerbated the adverse adoption of both
tubewells and Bt cotton.
Factors such as climate change in Telangana are set to decrease monsoon rainfall by 5-10%
between 2030 and 2060 (Reddy et al, 2014c), which is significant because rainfall makes up
67% of the recharge of aquifers in India (Asoka et al, 2018). Perversely however, the Green
House Gas (GHG) emissions from electricity for tubewells in India contributes to 11% of total
GHG emissions in India alone.
171
This presents a perverse feedback loop where subsidies increase electricity consumption,
increasing GHGs, which increases rainfall variability in the monsoon and reduces both the total
quantity of rainfall in the season as well as groundwater recharge. This means that electricity
subsidies will potentially reinforce the depletion of tubewells and rainfed Bt cotton outcomes
in the future too if the current system persists. India is on track to face potentially irreversible
groundwater depletion by 2025 of 60% of its aquifers if current groundwater extraction rates
continue (Rajan et al, 2020), underlining the impending problems of climate change and its
role in worsening Bt cotton and tubewell outcomes in the fragile economic, climatic, and
hydrogeological landscape as Telangana. Interviewee A2, an academic, summarised the nexus
of policy making and adverse environmental outcomes for farmers in the Liberalised Green
Revolution era:
“…We do not live in a system where farmers can be told what to grow and what not to
grow we live in a system where…policies make sure that incentives are almost always
perverse and almost sort of push farmers towards choices that are bad for them, bad for
water, bad for food, bad for the environment…the answer is not in terms of fancy
policies but the politics of who benefits and who loses.” (A2, academic, 1/8/18)
Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation were both introduced at similar times in Kacharam but the
profit maximising siloes of irrigation firms, input dealers and moneylenders increased their
revenue streams rather than the sustainability or profitability of the investment for the farmer.
Irrigating a high-water intensive household food crop such as rice in the dry season also
exacerbated the exploitation of groundwater in the least appropriate way for farmers in
Kacharam, while leaving them with no way to repay their investments on Bt cotton in leaving
it rainfed. This was not only the case in Kacharam, but Telangana and Nalgonda district more
widely too, as shown by Figure 47 and 48 below. For Telangana, cotton irrigated area covered
between 10-15% of the total cotton area between 1998-2018. For Nalgonda, it was <1%, with
the blue cotton area not even visible on the graph (DES India, 2018; 2019a, b).
172
Figure 47 - Cotton Irrigated Area Telangana 1998-2018
Source: DES Telangana (2016); DES India (2018; 2019a, b)
Figure 48 - Cotton Irrigated Area Nalgonda 1998-2018
Source: DES India (2018; 2019a, b)
0
500000
1000000
1500000
2000000
2500000
Hec
tare
s
Year
Cotton Irrigated Area Total Cotton Area
0
50000
100000
150000
200000
250000
300000
350000
400000
Hec
tare
s
Year
Nalgonda Cotton Irrigated Area Nalgonda Cotton Area
173
Rainfed Bt cotton is the norm across India too, with less than 33% of Bt cotton irrigated in
total, but with significant variability. Some states such as Gujarat, Haryana, Punjab, and
Rajasthan irrigate cotton at higher rates and have higher yields than Telangana (Shah, 2011;
Plewis, 2019; Todhunter, 2020). Therefore, the fact that Telangana relies on rainfed cotton has
negatively impacted on productivity. Out of 11 cotton growing states in India, Telangana has
the 3rd largest area and production, but comes 10th in yields (DES Telangana, 2016). In
Kacharam, like most of Telangana, the dominance of the private sector in extension advice has
denied farmers from using more profitable irrigation patterns, as farmers drilled tubewells to
failure for their least efficient use, to grow rice in the dry season. In an agronomic study across
Nalgonda and Warangal district in Telangana, Dev and Rao (2007) found in 2004-5 that
irrigated Bt cotton produced 35% greater yields than non-irrigated Bt cotton. In addition,
Glover (2010b) finds that during initial field trials of Bt cotton in India in the early 2000s, yield
growth comparisons compared irrigated Bt cotton with irrigated non-Bt cotton. This means the
optimal conditions from which Bt cotton’s superiority was marketed were in irrigated
conditions, unlike most of Bt cotton grown in India today (Rawal and Swaminathan, 2011;
Gutierrez et al, 2020).
Amidst an imperfect set of alternative cropping choices to sustain economic livelihoods for
smallholder farmers, one way forward could be to drip irrigate Bt cotton. This has shown to
increase Bt cotton yields by 114% relative to flood irrigation, while saving 50%-60% of the
water and 45% of the costs (Narayanamoorthy, 2008). The reasoning behind irrigating cotton
is explained by Sharma et al (2018: p144-145):
“Rain fed cotton requires a minimum rainfall of 500 mm, with favourable distribution
for good cotton yields which generally is not available and leads to crop failures or very
low yields. Cotton requires four to six irrigations, depending upon soil type and
seasonal rainfall… The crop must not be allowed to suffer water stress during flowering
and fruiting stage, otherwise a lot of shedding of flowers and bolls will take place
resulting in low cotton yield.”
As Chapter 4 has shown, the lack of reliable monsoon rainfall has driven farmers into debt
traps from persistent harvest failures in Bt cotton. As there is so much expense and debt riding
on Bt cotton, farmers in Kacharam with drip irrigation could have seen an improved outcome.
Considering the dual failures and debts from tubewells and Bt cotton, a mixture of fear,
apprehension and resigned fatalism drained farmers of any confidence in tubewells working
174
again. This was a realisation that came after years of misery. For many farmers, tubewells have
yielded disastrous outcomes: high failure rates, high debts, failed rice crops and failed Bt
cotton. Faced with the second successive poor monsoon in 2019 at the end of fieldwork and
cumulative years of tubewell problems, a consensus emerged from 60 out of the 65 farmers
interviewed in Kacharam of losing faith in tubewells as a technology. For farmer D12, a middle
aged OBC farmer with three children to support, years of successive failures from tubewells
depleted him of his hope and finances:
“It will cost another [$1462] and who knows whether it will work or not I have a doubt
about it. There is not good rainfall I do not have the confidence I have a fear of it failing
and falling into further debt. If we take out a loan then we will have to pay interest and
will have nothing to show for it with a failed borewell.” (D12, farmer, 2/7/19)
This was also reflected in a demand shortfall for private irrigation firms in recent years, as
revealed by an exchange with interviewee D60, an irrigation firm, who felt that farmers have
become apprehensive with further tubewell investments:
“[Tubewell] demand has reduced for the last 3 years. Farmers have drilled for a few
years but they are now tired of drilling drilling drilling they are fed up. They don’t want
to drill for [tubewells]….we are facing losses” (D60, irrigation firm, 11/7/19).
At a time when Bt cotton and tubewells have rendered farming livelihoods unviable in the long
term, farmers are increasingly pivoting towards non-farm incomes to make a living. Tubewell
irrigation was a widely adopted Liberalised Green Revolution technology in Kacharam but in
an unsuitable climate and topography. The unregulated tubewell market brought the technology
to millions of poor farmers in Telangana via easy credit and private irrigation firms, and
politically expedient free electricity schemes from the Telangana government to grow dry
season rice. Nonetheless, in the long term, it led to the exhaustion of farming livelihoods and
few economic or food security returns to show for it. Rather, it has spurred a crisis in farming
that has forced farmers off the farm to scrape together a living. It has been the antithesis of the
universal, linear technology led transformation in agriculture that agricultural modernisation
proponents propagated in the most dramatic fashion (Vasavi, 2019; 2020).
175
5.3 Conclusion
The answer to this chapter’s research question: “How has tubewell irrigation changed the
political economy of agriculture in Telangana?” is quite clear. Erratic monsoons and poor
storage, recharge and yields of hard rock aquifers in Telangana made for an adverse ecological
setting to introduce tubewells. Factors such as populist public policy, competitive tubewell
drilling, unsuitable crop irrigation choices, increasing debts and reliance on irrigation firms for
extension advice has plunged farmers into crisis through tubewell irrigation. The drill failure
rates and unproductive use of tubewells make it a debt laden technology with only 10 out of 69
households successfully able to grow rice in the dry season, while their Bt cotton cash crop
was left to fail under erratic monsoons. Overall, tubewells delivered failure rates of 89% for
the 215 wells drilled since the adoption of tubewells took place 20 years ago, becoming the
most common source of debt for farmers at over $2,000. In fact, debts from both Bt cotton and
tubewells contributed to 47% of all outstanding debt in Kacharam, as they were used seperately
so there was little chance to recoup their investments.
The unregulated tubewell market and free electricity scheme from the Telangana government
enabled the widespread adoption of tubewells but also perpetuated the continual drilling of
wells for farmers. In addition, the lack of government involvement in regulation or use of
tubewells meant that private irrigation firms were relied upon to provide extension support to
the farmers. As private irrigation firms were also the salesperson of the tubewell, they
privileged repeat business from farmers over sustainable use, encouraging multiple drill
attempts for each farmer. This made it more profitable for the tubewell firm for the farmer to
fail than find a successful tubewell. Facing repeated failure over 10 years and only intermittent
successes, farmers have largely abandoned tubewells, failed by its promises of prosperity.
Chapter 6 explores the future consequences for agricultural livelihoods in Kacharam after the
Liberalised Green Revolution. It links concurrent Bt cotton and tubewell adoption to distress
induced transitions to non-farm livelihoods to make up for their lost gambles in agriculture.
Moreover, it demonstrates the intergenerational exit from agriculture for educated rural youth
out of witnessing their parents’ failures from the Liberalised Green Revolution. Nonetheless,
due to the informal, menial, and insecure nature of non-farm jobs in India, incomes from all
generations of rural households have been neither stable or remunerative enough to meet debts
and rising household expenditures. Hence, a life outside farming in itself provides new
problems of insecurity.
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Chapter 6 – What are the implications of the Liberalised Green Revolution
for future agricultural livelihoods in Telangana?
6.1 Introduction
Chapter 5 examined smallholder tubewell adoption in Telangana and Kacharam and its
implications for agricultural livelihoods. Most farmers practised rainfed agriculture prior to
tubewells, living outside of canal command areas and priced out of available dugwells. After
liberalisation in the 1990s, public sector cutbacks saw governments incentivised private
irrigation firms to market, compete and expand groundwater irrigation adoption to rainfed
smallholders via new, advanced tubewell technologies. Like Bt cotton, tubewells were a key
Liberalised Green Revolution technology. Farmers adopted irrigation to grow rice, financing
investments with widely accessible informal credit and lower tubewell prices from market
competition. Irrigation adoption also took off via state government electricity subsidies, as part
of their vision to make Telangana a rice bowl of India. Despite initial gains from rice
cultivation, tubewell expansion occurred in a highly unsuitable aquifer, climate and political
economy setting. Electricity subsidies and irrigation firms incentivised ceaseless investments
in wells and drove up well densities to the point of widespread aquifer depletion in Kacharam
and Telangana. 89% of all 215 wells drilled in Kacharam failed since 2000, pushing farmers
into debt traps and non-farm livelihoods to survive. This chapter answers the research question:
“What are the implications of the Liberalised Green Revolution for future agricultural
livelihoods in Telangana?”. I will divide the chapter into four sections.
This first section explores smallholder outcomes from the Liberalised Green Revolution,
creating deagrarianisation and structural change in the rural economy towards non-farm
livelihoods. Following the Liberalised Green Revolution model shown in Chapter 2, the four
factors of environment, credit/debt relations, market intermediaries and governments
facilitated rapid technology driven intensification to integrate smallholder farmers in marginal
settings into markets but caused adverse long term outcomes. As demonstrated in Chapters 4
and 5, Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation adoption in Telangana and Kacharam increased the
capital expenditures, risk and indebtedness for adopting farmers without sustained yields or
profitability over the long term, due to the unsuitability of the climate, soils and groundwater.
177
In Kacharam in 2018, this resulted in non-farm incomes making up between 39% to 70% of all
household income across all caste, class, and gender categories. Non-farm incomes are defined
as rural economic activities that do not directly come from crop and livestock production and
includes agricultural wage labour, non-agricultural wage labour, non-agricultural self-
employment and remittances and transfers (Lanjouw et al, 2013; Reddy et al, 2014). Facing
rising debt obligations from agriculture and household expenditures, farmers were forced to
abandon agriculture as a primary income and rely on a variety of non-farm incomes to make a
living.
Hence, this trajectory is contrary to the structural transformation pathway from agriculture to
non-farm livelihoods (De Janvry, 2010). This normative assumption claims that agricultural
technology adoption increases yields, profits, and economic growth. Farmers with higher
incomes drive demand and investments into non-farm non-agricultural goods and services
(Bergius et al, 2018). Subsequently, farmers exit agriculture by diversifying into the non-farm
sector and urbanisation that enables a structural transformation from agriculture to service and
manufacturing sectors dominated economy (Reddy et al, 2014b). Instead, in Telangana and
Kacharam, non-farm livelihoods were sought out from a position of desperation resulting in
deagrarianisation from adverse outcomes from commercial farming.
Non-farm livelihoods have become integral for rural households in Telangana, as only 52% of
rural households in 2013 relied on agriculture as their main income (Reddy, 2014). Agriculture
continues to employ 55% of Telangana’s workforce, but the sector’s contribution to GDP has
declined from 16.3% in 2011 to 12.9% in 2020 (DES, 2020), no longer remunerative for many
farmers (Jakimow, 2014; Stone and Flachs, 2015). Finally, between 1991-2012, Datt et al
(2020) show that non-farm incomes from service and manufacturing sectors were responsible
for 91% of total poverty reduction in India, compared to only 9% for agriculture, despite 43%
of the country’s workforce relying on agriculture (DES India, 2018). This underlines the lack
of returns from agriculture despite commercialisation in the Liberalised Green Revolution since
the 1990s.
Second, the chapter focuses on the intergenerational dynamics of non-farm transitions, where
rural youth desire for social mobility and to exit agriculture. The key to this has been improved
educational outcomes and witnessing their parents’ long-term outcomes from agricultural
commercialisation. In Telangana, enrolment in colleges and universities between 2005-12
increased from 15% to 35% (Kannibiran et al, 2017). In Kacharam, 85% of household heads
178
had no formal education, compared to over 50% of 15-29-year-olds in the village having a 10th
grade education or higher, including 31-degree graduates. Wanting also for their children to
leave the farm and not suffer the same hardships as them, farmers invested in their children’s
education to help them attain salaried work outside the village. Opinion surveys carried out in
Kacharam confirmed an average of 67% of farming households heads across class, caste and
gender desired for their children to not practise agriculture for a living.
Third, this chapter investigates the non-farm labour market in India dominated by low paid and
insecure jobs, and the consequences for rural households in Telangana and Kacharam. The shift
in Kacharam to non-farm incomes has done little to address rising debt obligations from
Liberalised Green Revolution technologies and household expenditures. For the average
household across all classes, castes, and genders in Kacharam in 2018, net incomes were
-$1,550, indicating expenditure and debts to be vastly greater than farm and non-farm income.
Older farmers worked in agricultural or construction labour and a government work guarantee
scheme called MNREGA, earning an average of $3-7 per day and finding work only for 10-15
days per month in the dry season. This corroborates with all India rural wages of $3-5 per day,
just higher than the international poverty line of $1.90 (New Indian Express, 2020b).
For younger educated generations in Kacharam, only 40% of degree graduates in Kacharam
had jobs, working as rickshaw/car drivers and shop assistants, earning as little as $5 per day
and relegated to menial work or dropping out of the labour market altogether. In Telangana,
the rural youth unemployment is 25%, the fifth worst in India (Newsclick, 2018). In India,
since 2005, only 7% of all jobs created were in the formal sector (Srivastava et al, 2020).
Finally, the chapter explores the implications of inadequate agricultural and non-farm incomes
in Kacharam. This has pushed farmers into what I term a “risk indebtedness treadmill”,
strategies where farmers engage in short term cash earning opportunities to repay debts, but in
the process create further indebtedness and undermine their asset base. For instance,
reinvesting in Bt cotton, loan stacking and selling land. The chapter concludes by assessing the
prospects of future rural livelihoods in Kacharam and Telangana considering the economic
distress both from the Liberalised Green Revolution and non-farm livelihoods.
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6.2 Distress driven farm to non-farm transitions in Telangana and Kacharam
India is a primarily agrarian country with 70% of the population living in rural areas and 43%
of the workforce in agriculture as a primary occupation (DES India, 2018). However, due to
unremunerative returns from agriculture, non-farm incomes are increasingly playing a more
prominent role. In Telangana, representative state-wide surveys showed that 57% of rural
households relied primarily on non-farm incomes (NFHS, 2016). At an India level, Chand et
al (2017) found that the non-farm sector contributed to 65% of rural household incomes within
agricultural households.
Table 9 below shows that in Kacharam, 39% to 70% of total household income came from
non-farm livelihoods. Even though most households self-identify as farming households, the
most important income is actually non-farm sources.
Table 9 - Non-farm Incomes
Household Category Count Household
Income ($)
Non-Farm
Income ($)
Non-Farm
Income % Of
Household
Income
All Farmers 105 1948 996 51
OBC 74 1819 757 42
SC 23 2541 1741 69
ST 8 1443 1011 70
Widow 11 2391 1516 63
Non-Widow 94 1897 934 49
Marginal (<1 ha) 33 1820 1229 68
Small (1-2 ha) 56 1905 905 48
Medium (>2-5 ha) 16 2101 825 39
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
In the model of structural transformation within developing countries, agricultural
intensification was predicted to increase productivity and economic growth (Van Der Ploeg,
2014). Higher farm incomes were then expected to drive consumption demand and
reinvestment in other sectors of the economy. Eventually, the linkages with non-farm sector
led to urbanisation and industrialisation, and new job opportunities outside of farming pulled
people out of agriculture into non-farm work (Carlson, 2018). This is what Reddy et al (2014b)
call a demand pull or growth led rural non-farm transition.
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In Kacharam and Telangana, on the other hand, an adverse form of structural transformation
of farmer livelihoods occurred, what Singh and Bhogal (2016: p285) term as a:
“distress induced transformation, based on crisis-driven factors such as falling
productivity, increasing costs and decreasing returns, unemployment and
underemployment and indebtedness. These push factors force the agricultural
workforce towards non-farm activities.”
Due to persistent harvest and well failures in the Liberalised Green Revolution shown in
Chapters 4 and 5, the move to non-farm incomes was a response to their plight on their farm
and pressing need to repay debts from agriculture and household expenses. Non-farm incomes
subsidised the losses from agricultural commercialisation. This thesis makes a theoretical
distinction as to the type of farmers that exit agriculture. For agricultural modernisation
theorists, subsistence agriculture is regarded as an insufficient livelihood for maximising
economic growth, envisaging their exit out of agriculture and into wage labour or integration
into markets to increase their incomes (Li, 2009). Moreover, in the agrarian political economy
literature, scholars (Bernstein, 2010; Hebinck, 2018; Bennike et al, 2020) show how
subsistence farming in a market economy becomes increasingly unremunerative relative to the
economic demands on the household, requiring them to engage in different non farm activities
to make ends meet. This is evidenced at an India level, as Rahman and Mishra (2019) calculate
that 25% of smallholder farmers in India would fall below the poverty line if they did not earn
non-farm incomes.
However, in this thesis, I argue that adverse agricultural commercialisation is the causal driver
of the structural shift to non-farm livelihoods in Kacharam. This contrasts with subsistence
farming or agricultural intensification causing the exit from agriculture. The introduction of
high capital intensive and debt backed Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation occurred in a harsh
agroecological and aquifer environment and by intermediaries and governments in the
Liberalised Green Revolution. Yet, accumulating loans from farm losses and rising household
expenditure meant that interest repayments of 24% to 36% on informal credit increased,
pushing farmers to non-farm livelihoods out of no other choice. Farmer B19 in Kacharam, an
elderly ST farmer with 1 ha, felt agriculture was not remunerative for the past decade in the
village despite investing in 12 tubewells, which all failed and left him debts of $5,000. He felt
the same about Bt cotton despite growing it for 15 years. He said exasperatedly:
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“No nothing is left from farming. We get more money from working in the rice mill
and agricultural labour we don’t have any income from farming…we cannot meet the
costs of the household from just farming is why we go for agricultural labour. There
are no opportunities the fields have dried up [there is] no water.” (B19, farmer, 2/4/19)
The political economy of the capital, risk and debt backed Bt cotton and tubewell technologies
intersected with worsening aquifer and climate conditions over the last two decades, causing
an agrarian crisis. The bet on Bt cotton had devastating consequences for 85% of Kacharam’s
farmers who grew it as a monocrop and 66% of the village that adopted tubewells as the
expected profitability increasingly did not arrive.
This section has laid out the dynamics of the transition from farm to non-farm in Kacharam.
The fallout of the Liberalised Green Revolution in Kacharam have prompted unintended
deagrarianisation. The next section explores the intergenerational dynamics of non-farm
livelihoods for rural youth in Kacharam.
6.2.1 Rural youth and farming in Telangana and Kacharam
Education attainment in Kacharam and Telangana has been one of the most important
incentives for rural youth to leave farming behind, unwilling to endure the penury their parents
faced in the Liberalised Green Revolution. Youth within farming households, classified as ages
15-29, are much better educated than their parents’, part of a rural generation attaining
education for the first time in India (Jakimow, 2014). In Kacharam, 85% of household heads
have no formal education, compared to 53% of 15-29 year olds attaining a 10th grade education
or higher, with 23% of them degree educated. Gender wise, this corresponded to 54% of female
youth with a 10th grade education or higher, whereas for male youth the number was 72%. In
Telangana, the percentage of rural youth in tertiary education also increased from 30% to 36%
between 2011-20 (Kannibiran et al, 2017; DES Telangana, 2020). The percentages of rural
male and female youth engaging in agriculture in Telangana stood at 18% and 9% in 2004-5,
and decreased to 11% and 6% by 2011-12 (Kannibiran et al, 2017). In place of agriculture,
opportunities in the transport sector, salaried administration jobs and construction saw the
biggest increases in employment (ibid).
For the older farmers, helping their parents with farming from a young age made it an inherited
livelihood and asset, taking over their parents once they passed. Education was not a priority
for the current generation of farmers, as their own parents lacked the awareness, finances and
opportunity to educate them. For this generation, farming was a way of life they inherited from
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their parents. This is reflected by the fact that 85% of all farmer households have no formal
education. Similarly, in village surveys in 1975 in Mahbubnagar district in Telangana, Deb et
al (2014) found that households on average only had 3 years of schooling for males and 1 year
for females. This increased to 7 years for males and 5 years for females by 2011-12 respectively
(ibid). In helping out their parents on the farm from a young age, farming became a livelihood
they inherited as they took over the land from their parents. For the new generation of rural
youth in Kacharam, the practise and experience of farming at a young age was replaced by
education, as they were encouraged by their parents to not follow the farming trajectory.
For rural youth today, farming from childhood was replaced by education, as they were
encouraged by their parents not to farm. Farmers educated their children, and their children
were motivated to leave the farm and not fall into the same immiserating conditions of the
Liberalised Green Revolution as their parents did. This is confirmed in village wide opinion
surveys where I asked the question: “Would you like your child to practise agriculture as a
primary livelihood in the future?”. The responses to the question are laid out below in Table
10. Across every category, an average of 74% of farmers did not want their children to farm.
Table 10 - Farming Futures Survey
Household Category Count Farming Future
Children Yes (%)
Farming Future
Children No (%)
All Farmers 105 26 74
OBC 74 28 72
SC 23 26 74
ST 8 25 75
Widow 11 55 45
Non-Widow 94 22 78
Marginal (<1 ha) 33 12 88
Small (1-2 ha) 56 32 64
Medium (>2-5 ha) 16 31 69
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Table 10 showed that across all categories except widows, farmers wanted their children to not
go into agriculture. Widow’s responses can be explained by the fact that most of the widows
were females. In a highly patriarchal system such as India’s daughters are usually married off
into another village and sons stay behind to take care of the land. For widowed women the need
for their sons to take over is more important than for other types of households, simply because
of the need for extra labour on the farm and support for their mother in their old age.
Interviewee C57 was a middle aged OBC woman with 2.5 ha of land and made $147 profit in
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2018 from cotton. Fortunately, her son had an undergraduate degree, knew how to farm and
also worked in a fertiliser shop on a part time basis while writing exams for government jobs.
Referring to the help she received from her son, C57 commented:
“I am saved due to the land otherwise I would have been in an unimaginable
situation….my son’s income is the primary income for the household other than
farming”. (C57, farmer, 10/6/19)
For most farmers, they wanted their children to pursue better paid jobs with their educational
opportunities, bringing material and social advancement for the household (Jakobsen, 2019).
As Jakimow (2014) describes from her fieldwork in Telangana, education represented
progression in social status and dignity for the household imbued through their children,
compared to the grinding work and poverty they endured. For older generations, the definition
of a good life was for their children was to not go through hard labour in the fields which they
regarded as undignified, but instead work inside under a fan and at a desk, earning a monthly
salary (Jakimow, 2012).
Decisions to send their children to private school therefore are not taken lightly and require
recurring payments of fees. The purposeful decision to invest in children’s education, costing
up to $500 annually or 25% of annual household incomes, also came with the understanding
that their children would never learn how to farm. Farmers believed that if they educated their
children fully, they could escape the farm and secure a well-paying job. In some instances
among rural youth however they chose not to be educated out of dislike for school in their
childhood so dropped out. Later into adulthood they went into farming with no other option for
a livelihood (D7 Farmer, interview, 1/7/19). Farmer’s wanting their children to go into
agriculture therefore was as a last resort only if they had no education and no other options to
pursue.
Moreover, if older farmers were struggling to successfully grow Bt cotton despite farming since
childhood, there was no chance of their children surviving as farmers in Liberalised Green
Revolution. This is especially true considering the worsening climatic extremes and rainfall
variability farmers have experienced in Kacharam which has made farming risky. Therefore, it
was a better choice for farmers to not farm at all, as even if they did, they would not be able to
cope with the stresses and technical skills in farming. Farmer D30, a middle aged OBC woman,
raised her daughter on her own from infancy when her husband abandoned the family and
remarried. Owning less than 1 ha of land and struggling to make ends meet, it was clear to her
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that her daughter should live a better life than what she went through. Nor would she be able
to cope with farming in the unpredictable agroecological setting and high capital intensive
crops in Kacharam:
“No I want her to study I don’t want her to do farming oh no…because now we
ourselves are struggling to survive on the farm without any education so if she is more
intelligent becomes educated she can survive she can escape all of this…now the
children are studying what do they know about farming how will they cope with the
difficulty? If they get a job then their life will be set.” (D30, farmer, 26/6/19)
Farmers put their children through education at any cost to secure well paid non-farm jobs.
This aspiration was matched by their children, who watched their parents suffer through
repeated problems with agricultural commercialisation. The emphasis for younger generations
of farming households was to access greater occupational and income mobility through
education that their parents never enjoyed. For elder farming household heads, they accepted
the trade-off that their children would never know how to farm if they went to school, as even
they themselves struggled to make a meaningful livelihood out of farming in the Liberalised
Green Revolution. It meant accepting that this current generation of older farming households
may be the last generation of full-time farmers in the village.
This section has shown that non-farm livelihoods are not only a practical necessity but an
aspirational desire for their children to leave farming for good through education. The next
section however, reveals that non-farm incomes have not kept up with the rising indebtedness
and costs of living at the household level. The average household in Kacharam made -$1550
in the fieldwork year 2018, highlighting the gap between expenditure and income. These have
prompted them to engage in risky short term cash earning strategies I term “risk indebtedness
treadmills”. A key reason of why farmers have resorted to this is the prevalence of low paid,
menial non-farm jobs in India as the main employment option, even for their educated children.
Hence, the bet on their children’s education has not come to fruition, leaving rural households
mired in economic uncertainty.
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6.2.2 Contending with precarious non-farm employment in Kacharam and Telangana
Non-farm livelihoods in Telangana brought much needed income support for farmers who bore
the brunt of the agrarian crisis from the Liberalised Green Revolution. Non-farm livelihoods
provided work in the dry season for farmers in Telangana plus a permanent livelihood for the
younger educated generation. However, despite all non-farm household incomes across
generations, 100% of the 65 farmers interviewed felt that non-farm incomes were still
insufficient to simultaneously cover their interest repayments, household expenditure and farm
debts.
Older generations largely worked in low skilled agricultural labour, MNREGA and
construction labour, earning $3 to $7 per day. Adding up all labour days came to 298 days per
year per household, compared to 480 available workdays outside the farming season from June
to September for a husband-and-wife farmer. In total, this earned farmers on average $1075
per household in Kacharam. Farmers could only find non-farm work for 62% of the labour
days available in the dry season.
Labour however is highly gendered and segmented in rural areas, referred to as social
reproduction, which Katz (2001: p709) defines as:
“social practices through which people reproduce themselves on a daily and
generational basis and through which social relations and the material basis of
capitalism are renewed.”
For Levien et al (2018), these social practices include unpaid domestic work, child rearing and
lower pay and more precarious work in agricultural labour and construction work for women
relative to men, exemplifying differentiation in at all areas from within the household to labour
markets. Across all females in Kacharam aged over 18, farming was the primary occupation
for 58% of them and agricultural labour for 28%. Likewise for all males over 18 in Kacharam,
only 6% listed their primary occupation as agricultural labour and 61% for agriculture.
Agricultural labour is highly gendered with regards to the work done on the farm. Agricultural
labour is mostly conducted by women in the village, due to the gendered division of labour
demand. Labour intensive work such as hand weeding and picking cotton is done primarily by
women, owing to their lower agricultural wages at $2-3 per day and lack of desire for men to
do such a difficult task. Moreover, Venkateshwarlu and Da Corta (2001) report from Andhra
Pradesh that women were regarded by labour organisers as being easier to discipline and more
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willing to work in the cotton harvest season. In comparison, men do activities such as spraying
pesticides, tilling the land with tractors, weeding it with oxen, and spreading seeds. These tasks
require fewer people to carry it out and are less labour intensive so can be done in a shorter
period compared to women’s agricultural labour work. This explains why out of all the
agricultural labour in the village in Kacharam, women make up 60% to 70% of total days
worked. Men are paid $4 to $12 per day, the lowest paid work is for manual labour tasks and
the highest earners driving tractors or working oxen to till the land before a farmer plants the
seeds. In discussions with female household members, it was acknowledged that women are
in more demand for agricultural labour in cotton growing areas as cotton harvesting was the
most labour intensive and most important part of the cotton season (B6 farmer, 24/6/19).
A further aspect of gender differentiation is also in present in construction labour. Women are
mainly confined to the lowest skilled aspects of construction labour, such as lifting and
transporting cement bricks around the site. For this, they are paid $4 to $5 per day. In
comparison, men are paid $6 to $8 for equivalent work. Furthermore, men are able to access
more skilled construction labour roles such as masons, who on average earn $10 to $12 per day
from construction, supervising the lower skilled workers and working on more technical
aspects of construction. For the majority of women and men in the village, daily wage labour
is the most common available work, comprising of mostly unskilled, low paid and laborious
work. Within these daily wage labour positions however, women are paid less for equivalent
work and due to the gendered division of labour are unable to move up to more skilled roles in
both construction and agricultural labour. Their low pay is partly offset by the greater demand
for agricultural labour for women, especially during harvest season in picking rice or cotton.
For the educated rural youth in Kacharam, non-farm work as shop attendants or drivers in
nearby towns and cities earned better wages than their parents, at $5-10 per day. However,
even with rural youth incomes, households in Kacharam were still unable to meet their annual
expenses such as food, education, and medical care. A key reason for this household financial
situation has been the unfulfilled potential of educated rural youth in India in accessing salaried
jobs in towns and cities. This is a symptom of the inability of the labour market in India to
create adequate skilled jobs to meet the growing numbers of educated youth in India (Mehra,
2019).
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India has ideal demographic and educational conditions for an economic growth take off. The
median age in India is 29 compared to China’s 37 (Kaul, 2019), meaning that the working age
population vastly outnumbers the dependent elderly population, referred to as the demographic
golden age. Much of this young workforce is also educated and seeking work. The absolute
numbers of the 15-29 year olds in education have increased from 56.8 million in 2004-5 to 127
million in 2017-18, much faster than the population growth rate (Mehrotra and Parida, 2019).
India has experienced 5-8% annual economic growth rates since liberalisation in 1991
(Srivastava et al, 2020), but growth has not come with required increases in formal skilled jobs
either in the public or private sector. Out of the 61 million jobs created since 1991, 92% have
been informal jobs, characterised by low wages and little social protection or pensions (India
Spend, 2019). The main non-farm sector in rural areas has been construction, which grew at
17% per year from 9.4 million in 1999 to 54.3 million in 2017-18, making it the second biggest
employer in rural areas after agriculture (Dhanagare, 2016; Mehrotra and Parida, 2019).
Between 2005 and 2018 only 4.6 million formal jobs were created, 7% of the total (Srivastava
et al, 2020). This meant that 14% of 15-29 year olds in rural India in 2017 fell under the
working poverty rate of earning less than $1.90 per day (Reddy, 2020). This echoes Kacharam,
whereby both farmers and their children engage in low paid daily wage labour in construction
and in the transport sector. Though rural youth are better educated, they could not access the
social mobility both they and their parents expected, driving them into despair (Jakimow, 2016;
Aga, 2019).
The 2010s in India has been termed as the “lost decade” (Kaul, 2019), partly due to the financial
crisis causing an economic growth slowdown, rising youth unemployment and slow job
creation relative to demand (Pastore, 2018). Between 2012 and 2018, the construction and
service sectors only created 4.5 million jobs per year compared to 17.5 million job entrants into
the labour market annually (Jose Thomas, 2020). In this period moreover, 90.4% of all new
non-agricultural jobs were taken by men aged 30-59, leaving out youth and women (ibid). This
is partially because some educated youth are choosing to drop out from the labour market
altogether than enter low skilled jobs available (Reddy, 2020a).
The economic malaise has also exacerbated gender differentiation in the labour market. For
rural women in India, social relations at the household level and the labour market resign them
to the bottom of the social hierarchy, especially if they are already low class and low caste.
Lerche and Shah (2018) categorise their position in India’s economy as a form of conjugated
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oppression, as they not only face exploitation in agriculture and as wage labourers, but their
social reproduction of labour in the household is also devalued. Within a capitalist system, rural
women face a burden of gender and caste exploitation, but under a framework of class relations
(ibid). This translates to their livelihood opportunities in agriculture and non-agriculture,
relegated to the lowest paid, most laborious tasks while also expending reproductive labour at
the household level. This has been no different in the stagnation era in the 2010s. Owing to a
lack of economic opportunities in the labour market, Thomas (2020) notes that approximately
29m women withdrew from India’s workforce altogether a de-feminisation of the labour
market. In the working age category of 15-59, total employment for women declined from 43%
in 2005 to 23% in 2018, with the majority of women now classified as reproductive labour
(ibid).
In sectors like construction, women have historically been restricted to unskilled manual labour
through a gendered division of labour. Sanghera (2019) explains that in times of economic
contraction, women are the first to be let go, with men in skilled positions retaining their jobs
as supervisors and masons. Educational inequalities and labour market discrimination with
maternity leave have also diminished women’s chances in the more skilled labour markets too,
being left with limited options that avail their qualifications. This explains the disappearance
of rural women especially from India’s labour market during this stagnation. Not only are they
unable to gain access to the new non-farm jobs relative to men, but are discriminated at the
workplace through a gendered division of labour and have lower educational completion rates
than men. Faced with limited options to improve occupational and social mobility in a capitalist
and patriarchal system, women have exited the workforce altogether (Rao, 2018b).
For example, patriarchal and class relations affect entry into a labour market by poor women
through historic social norms of women’s access to education, discrimination at the work place,
and women’s role as child carers that limit promotions, equal pay and full time work
opportunities, and a gendered division of labour (Rao, 2018b). Making it easier to enter a labour
market in this case therefore does nothing to change social relations in women’s favour so they
benefit from it, as markets are built within a patriarchy (Katz, 2001). Market incorporation is
built upon local and context specific socio-cultural categories that adversely impact poverty
and inequality, rather than reduce them.
Low paid work in non-farm sectors has also been especially bleak for the educated rural youth
who expected better job prospects. In response to the lack of available and desirable non-farm
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jobs, between 2005 and 2018, the number of educated youth in NEET status in India (not in
employment, education or training) increased from 69.5 million to 100.2 million (Mehrotra and
Parida, 2019). In Telangana and Andhra Pradesh, the corresponding figure over this period
increased from 4.2 million to 5.8 million (ibid). This had important gender dynamics however.
Disaggregating further, Kannibiran et al (2017) found that in Telangana, the share of rural
female youth engaging in domestic and household work as their principal status increased from
18% to 28%, compared to only 4% for rural males. For women overall, the share of women in
unpaid work also increased from 35% to 39% between 2004-5 and 2011-12 in Telangana. In
India, 38% of the rural female population aged 15-24 are in the NEET category, compared to
only 12% for rural males in the same age group. When it comes to graduates moreover, 29%
of rural males and 38% of rural females are in this category, signifying a high drop out rate
from the labour market and under/unemployment.
A large portion of educated youth therefore are not only underemployed or unemployed but
are no longer looking for work, out of the options available to them. Youth unemployment
outpaced population growth between 2005 and 2018, increasing from 8.9 million to 25.1
million in this period (Mehrotra and Parida, 2019). In Andhra Pradesh and Telangana, the
situation has been even worse than the Indian average, as youth unemployment rose from 3%
in 2004-5 to 27.4% in 2018-19 versus the all-India average of 17.8% (The Print, 2020).
In Kacharam, only 15 out of 31-degree graduates in the village had jobs. Out of the 15, 6 were
car or rickshaw drivers, which are low daily wage jobs. The remaining worked in input or
grocery stores as attendants, earning up to $9 per day, much lower than what they expected in
the formal government or private sector jobs. Even within educated rural youth however,
employment was highly gendered. Amongst 68 female youth in the village, 54% had a 10th
grade education or higher, of whom 17 had degrees. However, only 3 out of 17 had jobs as
shopkeepers, teachers or in the private sector, with the rest unemployed or engaging in
housework. The exception in employment for rural females were for SC households, For SCs,
educational quotas in the public sector have helped the younger generations to become
educated for free and access better jobs than their parents. SC youth in the village are also
eligible for government jobs such as teachers, which has brought benefits especially to SC
women, as farmer D38 described, an SC farmer with two children who were both educated for
free via caste based quotas in education. From this, his daughter was also able to access quotas
in the labour market to become a public school teacher:
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“My daughter is also educated and now she is teaching at a English medium school…I
got my due with her. (D38, farmer, 3/7/19)
Due to caste based reservations in the labour market and education, the highest earning
occupation in the village are two SC female teachers, who earn on average $2777 per year
much higher than average earnings for non-farm livelihoods overall at $990 in the village. For
the rest of the educated female youth however, degrees have not come with employment.
In comparison, for the 72 male youth, 68% had a 10th grade education or higher, and 22 with
degrees. Amongst the degree educated youth, only 8 had jobs, of which 5 worked as drivers
and 3 in shops. Hence, despite the high level of unemployment amongst rural youth in
Kacharam, degree educated females have a higher unemployment rate, which demonstrates
that gains in education for women has not borne out in better labour market outcomes, which
is emblematic of wider trends at the Telangana or India level.
The story of educated youth in Kacharam has often been to persist in a menial job that is
unfulfilling, while they apply for better positions elsewhere in the private or public sector.
Farmer C37, an SC widow with two young degree educated sons, last made a profit from Bt
cotton three years ago. The loss of her husband a decade ago, plus her underemployed sons left
her lamenting why, despite doing everything right, she was not seeing the gains from her efforts
to educating them:
“Back then my husband was still alive it was good…we [now] feel like there is no
difference between us planting cotton or not in terms of welfare…The elder [son] is
educated but is struggling to find a job so he does odd jobs here and there…What can
[our extended family] do [to help us] they are in the same situation as us.” (C37, farmer,
19/6/19)
Over 50% of the degree educated rural youth in the village were either desperately seeking
work or in the worst case giving up on looking altogether, passing their time in the village
playing cards, cricket or watching Youtube videos on their mobiles. Internally, youth
joblessness not only diminished their own aspirations in living a better life and securing a well-
paid job, but their parents’ too (Aga, 2019). This difficulty in finding jobs and of the labour
market for the younger generation had a direct impact on household finances. Farmers relied
on getting their educated children into a decent government or private sector job that provides
a monthly income. In Kacharam however, many farmers find their children working in menial
and unfulfilling jobs despite degrees, unable to get a foothold in the labour market. While this
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situation persists, farming households’ economic pressures remain, with too many financial
liabilities to repay and too little income coming in.
A major financial obligation was the interest repayments farmers had to make annually to
moneylenders and input dealers on their debts. These were primarily from farming but also
marriages, weddings, medical expenses or from buying TVs, mobile phones, or motorbikes on
credit (Louis, 2015; Jakobsen, 2019). As revealed in Chapters 4 and 5, debt burdens for farmers
from Liberalised Green Revolution and the rising cost of living was backed by informal credit
in Kacharam (C5, farmer, 11/6/19). Informal lenders were preferred by farmers over formal
sources for their flexibility in repayment terms. Farmers took out loans from informal creditors
as they were only required to repay annual interest in exchange for new loans. In comparison,
banks required farmers to pay the full principle plus interest to renew loans. In exchange for
easy credit terms however, farmers were obliged to pay higher annual interest repayments of
24% to 36%, sometimes up to 60% in emergencies (Taylor, 2013b).
Average household debts in Kacharam were $3,500 across all castes, classes, and genders,
meaning just annual interest payments alone were between $840 to $1,260, which was 40% to
60% of total household income annually of ~$2100. Table 11 below shows the total household
income, expenditures, and net incomes for farming households in Kacharam. Every category
of household in Kacharam faced average net losses of $1124 to $1550 for the year 2018. The
culmination of interest repayments, household expenses and farm losses in the Liberalised
Green Revolution drove farmers to a grave financial situation.
Table 11 - Net Household Incomes in Kacharam
Source: Ambarish Karamchedu (2019)
Household
Category
Count Total
Household
Income ($)
Total
Household
Expenses +
24%
Interest
Repayment
($)
Total
Household
Expenses +
36%
Interest
Repayment
($)
Net Income
after 24%
Interest
Repayment
($)
Net Income
after 36%
Interest
Repayment
($)
All Farmers 105 2093 3217 3643 -1124 -1550
OBC 74 1924 3182 3634 -1258 -1710
SC 23 2707 3249 3633 -543 -926
ST 8 1828 3792 4250 -1964 -2422
Widow 11 2571 2225 2568 346 3
Non-Widow 94 1945 3361 3810 -1416 -1865
Marginal (<1 ha) 33 1946 2501 2924 -555 -978
Small (1-2 ha) 56 2171 3322 3708 -1152 -1537
Medium (>2-5 ha) 16 2122 4469 5110 -2347 -2988
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All but one category of farming households had vastly higher expenditure compared to their
incomes. Table 11 furthermore looked at the best-case scenario and worst-case scenario for
households, comparing 24% and 36% annual interest repayments added onto household
expenditure. Even with the best-case scenario of 24% interest, households on average made a
loss of $1124 across all categories, after all household expenditures. For the worst-case
scenario of a 36% annual interest rate repayment, the net losses for farmers worsened to $1550.
Liberalised Green Revolution technologies added on top of rising household costs and interest
repayments on debt. Both farmer C47 and his wife worked in agricultural labour to make ends
meet and with two young children to support, due to losses of $1346 from Bt cotton in 2018.
Overall, counting net incomes even before his debt repayments, his household lost $2145,
leaving him in despair:
“We go between farming and agricultural labour to find work…we planted twice, and
we didn’t even recoup costs of one round of seeds and inputs…agricultural labour we
don’t get much either…farming, inputs, building an extension on the house, buying
sheep we have so many expenses so we are in debt…we are [only] paying the interest.”
(C47, farmer, 7/6/19)
Farmers’ main debts came from Bt cotton and tubewells, followed by one-off life events such
as medical emergencies and marriage. Debts from Bt cotton and tubewells were the single
highest debt source for 47% of farming households in Kacharam, at an average debt of $2200.
This rise in indebtedness and expenses relative to household incomes was also evident
elsewhere in Telangana. In Deb et al (2014)’s study in two villages in Mahabubnagar district,
they found that between 1989 and 2011, debts increased almost 6x in real terms, with an
average of 65% of loans coming from informal credit sources. Debts came from farm
investments in Bt cotton and tubewells as well as increases in ownership of motorbikes, fridges,
mobile phones, and TVs. In this time frame, per capita incomes only increased by 5x in one of
the villages, meaning consumption expenditure and farm investments were rising faster than
incomes (ibid). Finally, Telangana wide figures revealed that the 89% of agricultural
households were indebted in 2013, compared to 57% at the India level (NSSO, 2013a).
Between 2002 and 2013, debts across all class categories increased by an average of 14x in
real terms for farming households in Telangana (Reddy, 2014). As a result of their mounting
indebtedness and inability to repay, farmers in Kacharam engaged in risky cash earning
strategies that I call “risk indebtedness treadmills” to keep on top of their repayments. I explore
these strategies in the next section.
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6.2.3 Risk indebtedness treadmills
Pressed from low incomes from farm and non-farm work and debt repayments, farmers
resorted to several strategies to dig themselves out of their economic situation. Farmers must
repay the interest on their loans annually to renew loans for the next year, so prioritise that
from whatever income they earn. Farmers have resorted to several cash earning strategies as a
last-ditch effort, what I call “risk indebtedness treadmills”. These are distress inducing income
strategies that involve generating short term cash but at the cost of long term immiseration.
Risk indebtedness treadmills meet short term cash needs for farmers. These occur as a response
to the fact that farmers have no real easy solutions to escape their financial obligation but need
cash in the short term to stave off the worst-case scenario of defaulting on their debts and
having their land seized from them. Farmer C3, a young OBC farmer, worked in agricultural
labour with his wife but all incomes in 2018 from farm and non-farm came to $347, versus
household expenses of $720. This made it impossible to repay his debts in the short or the long
term, but the minimum he needed to pay was the interest each year:
“They add the interest repayments onto the next year they don’t cause a fuss but add a
cumulative repayment term. If we do not pay the interest they complain. We paid it this
year.” (C3, farmer, 7/6/19)
With no prospect of paying off the principle, farmers can still take out new loans with the
moneylender if they keep on top of the interest payments. Keeping good faith with their
moneylenders was so they could continue to take out new loans to finance their rising cost of
living and economic obligations. This strategy of prioritising interest repayments kept them
afloat for another year as the moneylender continued to issue new loans. These loans were then
used to pay for the next most pressing financial payments they need to make, be it education,
a medical emergency or farm investments. Additionally, farmers stacked loans from different
sources to repay their existing interest repayments, further perpetuating their indebtedness (C3,
farmer, 7/6/19). Using smaller loans e.g. from microcredit, farmers would use these to pay off
larger informal interest repayments annually. This matches fieldwork in Telangana by
Ramprasad (2019), who reported similar strategies of loan stacking between formal and
informal sources. This, however, formed a risk indebtedness treadmill, as taking out new loans
increased the overall debt and therefore also the interest payments, worsening the household
finances in the long term and keeping them within tighter debt relations.
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The second strategy for farmers was to double down on their Bt cotton investments for the
coming year. Despite the problems of indebtedness and harvest failures with Bt cotton shown
in Chapter 4 the hope remained that they would strike lucky one time and it will solve their
problems. After all they went through, the hope remained that its profitability would come to
fruition one day. This is like the sunk cost fallacy of drilling tubewells deeper and expecting it
to yield groundwater, as shown in Chapter 5 (Marechal, 2010). So, the choice to keep growing
Bt cotton could ruin them and increase their risk and debt loads and interest repayments in
future years but a good harvest could also bring a golden income. This calculus of risk however
often pushed towards a loss, due to the lack of suitability of Bt cotton for Telangana with
climate extremes and erratic rainfall. This makes the decision to continue growing Bt cotton a
strategy that perpetuates a risk indebtedness treadmill.
In Mahbubnagar district in Telangana, Jakimow (2014) also found repeated gambles from
farmers in borrowing further loans to grow Bt cotton. She explained that the chance of one
bountiful harvest from Bt cotton was worth years of failure to farmers, despite mounting
evidence that it did not bring the promised returns (ibid). This also matches Bt cotton
cultivation in Burkina Faso, where scholars revealed that it was the biggest economic risk and
debt for households but the only crop with a high enough market price to meet household costs
(Luna, 2019). Similarly, in Kacharam, though a Bt cotton golden harvest did not arrive in recent
years, the prospect that it may still one day come was enough to sustain farmers in reinvesting,
backed by informal credit lines to renew their loans each year.
The final short-term cash strategy was for farmers to sell their assets such as land and livestock.
This was done for meeting agricultural investments for planting before the monsoon but also
one-off expenses such as medical emergencies or marriage. Selling land was the last resort out
of all options however as farmers held a deep cultural identity with their land, something they
inherited and chose to pass onto their children (D7, farmer, 2/7/19). Yet, left with no choice
and mounting debts, farmers have been selling pieces of land to pay for expenses. Equally, in
the case of Bt cotton debts in Burkina Faso, Gray and Dowd-Uribe (2013) report how low Bt
cotton yields in rainfed conditions forced farmers to sell off assets to meet debt repayments. In
Kacharam, since 2017, I found that 15 households sold a portion of their land and 8 households
sold their livestock. In fact, land sales were the highest sources of non-farm income in
household surveys in 2018 in Kacharam at $2300. This reflects the fact that non-productive
activities are the highest earning non-farm incomes in Kacharam, showing activities like wage
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labour and shop work to be relatively low paid. In times of stress however, the instant need for
cash required drastic measures for farmers to sell land. Farmer C30 was one such example, a
middle-aged SC farmer who had to deal with her daughter having pregnancy complications,
breaking her own leg and her other daughter’s marriage in a space of a few weeks:
“We had a lot of health problems to deal with. We had [$2923] to [$4385] of debts that
way. [Due to] hospital expenses…we sold an acre for my daughter’s wedding then 15
days later I fell down and broke my leg. It cost [$2923] [but] then within a year my
daughter became sick.” (C30, farmer, 18/6/19)
For this household, consecutive emergencies required land to be sold. Land, however, is often
also the most valuable asset a farmer holds, both in terms of monetary value and its cultural
significance. Selling land is a strategy that perpetuates a risk indebtedness treadmill as the more
land that a farmer sells, the smaller their asset base for collateral for future loans. The distress
strategy solved the immediate short-term cash emergency but reduced the landholding size in
the long run. This is especially risky as the average landholding in Kacharam is already low at
1.2 ha.
Based on nationally representative household surveys, land contributed to 71.3% of total assets
of rural households in Telangana and 72.6% at the all-India level (NSSO, 2013d, e). Selling
land was not an option except in emergencies when no more loans can be taken out and all
other risk indebtedness treadmill options had been exhausted. Selling land moreover would be
a one-off scenario after which they no longer have the asset after their last chunk of land is
sold. Nonetheless, the growing trend in Kacharam has been to engage in this distress tactic that
shrunk their assets, future ability to borrow, erased their cultural attachment to land and left
them with a smaller land parcel to farm on.
Burdened by debts from Bt cotton and tubewell investments that did not pay off and rising
household costs, farmers in Kacharam resorted to earning non-farm incomes, as well as
investing in their children’s education to help them secure salaried jobs and leave farming. Yet,
as a function of a jobs crisis in India, non-farm incomes have largely been low paid and
insecure, forcing farmers to resort to the three “risk indebtedness treadmill” tactics mentioned
to keep the household afloat, but in the process undermining their asset base and debt relations.
This demonstrates that there are no easy answers in this transition from the farm to the non-
farm and the future of agriculture in Kacharam.
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6.3 Conclusion
To respond to their economic burden from Liberalised Green Revolution, farmers in Kacharam
and Telangana have transitioned into relying on non-farm incomes for survival. Non-farm
incomes make up the biggest share in household incomes for farmers, and so have been an
important coping strategy for dealing with unremunerative agricultural incomes. However,
available non-farm livelihood options in Kacharam were largely limited to daily wage labour
roles characterised by low pay, insecure contracts, and insufficient supply of labour days.
Despite the transition to non-farm livelihoods, household incomes are simply inadequate for
meeting farmers’ expenditures from farming, household consumption and debt repayments.
The biggest bet for farmers was to educate their children. Education was paramount for
farmers’ children, a ticket to a better, more secure life away from the problems they faced in
farming. Unfortunately, the last decade in India has seen a big rise in young, educated job
seekers relative to the jobs created in the non-farm sector in number and quality. Kacharam’s
youth are therefore inhibited by the broader political economy of the labour market in the
country. Left with little choice in the non-farm sector, many youths in Kacharam have retreated
from the job market altogether or persist in menial jobs, while they wait to catch a lucky break.
This has important implications for households as farmers’ reliance on their educated children
to get them out of their economic problems has not paid off, and they are faced with
increasingly desperate set of distress inducing options to cope.
These set of constraints in non-farm livelihoods and desperation from limited alternative
sources of income prompted farmers to employ short term cash earning strategies that I called
a “risk indebtedness treadmill”, used to repay interest on loans and secure informal credit lines
for another year. Three examples of these include selling parts of their land, stacking loans and
continuing to reinvest in Bt cotton. While they placated temporary cash flow needs for the
household, they also undermined their economic base further, creating more indebtedness in
the long run. The transition from the farm to the non-farm was touted as the solution for
Kacharam and India’s failing agricultural fortunes. Yet, it brought its own problems and had
few answers to help farmers and their children lead a better life as they hoped it would. Instead,
they persist and survive ever more desperately from an uncertain and unyielding future both in
farming and outside of it.
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Chapter 7 - Discussion
7.1 Introduction
The previous analysis chapters 4, 5 and 6 answered each of the three research questions of the
thesis on agrarian change and the Liberalised Green Revolution:
1) What are the consequences of Bt cotton farming in the Liberalised Green
Revolution in Telangana?
2) How has tubewell irrigation changed the political economy of agriculture in
Telangana?
3) What are the implications of the Liberalised Green Revolution for the future of
agricultural livelihoods in Telangana?
This discussion chapter situates the findings of the thesis within the broader literature covered
in Chapter 2, both the Liberalised Green Revolution framework and literature on Bt cotton and
tubewell irrigation in India. In doing so, the chapter relates the findings from the thesis to the
Indian context and similar developing country marginal settings. Plus, I engage with theoretical
debates on agricultural commercialisation in agroecologically fragile smallholder settings.
Based on the findings from the fieldwork in Kacharam, this chapter finds that the Liberalised
Green Revolution through informal credit, government subsidies and market intermediaries
enabled smallholder integration into commodity agriculture through the adoption of Bt cotton
and tubewell irrigation. Yet, long-term farm incomes and indebtedness from technology
adoption in marginal areas forced them to leave agriculture for economic survival as an
unintentional side effect of agricultural commercialisation.
In an original finding, I theorised the Liberalised Green Revolution, providing an explanatory
process of how and why potentially adverse agricultural commercialisation can take place in
marginal settings, pointing to the intersection of four factors of environment, credit/debt,
market intermediaries and governments. I located market intermediaries of input dealers,
moneylenders, and irrigation firms as the drivers of technology adoption and agrarian change
in marginal settings. In Kacharam I found that the interlinkages of these four factors tentatively
explained the adverse Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation smallholder adoption and the distress
driven non-farm livelihood transitions it creates.
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This chapter will first revisit the Liberalised Green Revolution in context of the thesis findings,
then insert the original findings within the four key causes of environmental conditions,
credit/debt relations, market intermediaries and governments in partially explaining farming
outcomes. In doing so, I will engage with theoretical and empirical debates in the literature on
technology and agrarian change in India that I build on or disagree with. The chapter will then
conclude.
7.2 Revisiting and justifying the Liberalised Green Revolution
In Chapter 2 of the thesis, I proposed that since the 1980s, development donors, country
governments and IFIs have been attempting to replicate the Green Revolution model of
agricultural development in dryland smallholder regions in developing countries through
private sector led economic liberalisation (McMichael, 2009; Moseley et al, 2017). I chose to
define economic liberalisation as:
“new political, economic, and social arrangements within society that emphasize
market relations, re-tasking the role of the state, and individual responsibility…the
extension of competitive markets into all areas of life, including the economy, politics,
and society.” (Springer, 2016: p2)
I termed this private sector agricultural development epoch the “Liberalised Green
Revolution”. It retained similar goals to the Green Revolution of agricultural intensification
through the application of inputs, high yielding seed technologies and pesticides, but took place
in a different political economy, climatic and farmer context. The key differentiating factor was
that agricultural commercialisation this time was being attempted in agroecologically marginal
and economically poor areas in developing countries, involving rainfed subsistence farmers, a
short growing season of up to 120 days, low productivity soils, variable rainfall and worsening
climatic conditions of floods and droughts (Pender, 2007). These areas were largely ignored in
the initial Green Revolution due to the difficulty in replicating yields found in more favourable
areas through technological intensification (Byerlee et al, 2005; Pingali, 2012). Nonetheless,
these areas are globally significant, accounting for over 40% of the global surface area and
supporting 1.8 billion people (Li et al, 2020).
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Economic crises in the 1980s in developing countries initially created conditions for economic
liberalisation terms set by the World Bank, IMF and country governments but continue as the
agricultural policy norm today (Kashwan et al, 2019). For instance, efforts in the last decadeto
bring an agribusiness-led GM biotechnology “African Green Revolution” (Bergius and
Busteth, 2019).
Therein, I argued that the Liberalised Green Revolution involved agricultural
commercialisation in smallholder and marginal agroecological areas where the private sector
took the lead in credit, irrigation, inputs, seeds, and extension services, bringing a decentralised,
privatised and marketised agricultural intensification (Oya, 2010; 2011). It drew upon
modernisation theory of the 1960s and 1970s, the idea that technological improvements in
inputs, high yielding seeds and irrigation improved agricultural growth and farmer incomes.
These technologies moreover according to Birner and Resnick (2010) were scale neutral,
meaning they worked regardless of the size of landholding. In the Liberalised Green
Revolution, the lead role of intermediaries and agribusiness was to increase the availability and
reduce the cost of technologies through market competition and subsequently improve incomes
from high prices for commercial crops, high yielding seeds and irrigation (Byerlee et al, 2008;
Zhou, 2010; Venkateshwar and Bandopadhyay, 2016). This would transform the agricultural
sector and lead to the structural transformation of the economy through rising agricultural
growth and eventual industrialisation (Van der Ploeg, 2014; Bergius et al, 2018).
In critiquing the above characterisation of technology-led agrarian change, I proposed the
framework of the “Liberalised Green Revolution” in Chapter 2 to formulate the causal
mechanism of why agricultural commercialisation in agroecologically marginal areas in
particular political economy contexts may not improve farmers livelihoods in the long run. The
above theoretical proposition drew upon insights from agrarian political economy and political
ecology scholars who argued that uneven and detrimental outcomes from technology adoption
under agrarian change can occur due to a lack of consideration of the embedded social,
economic and agroecological context, and differentiated access and outcomes mediated by
caste, class, or gender (Gerber, 2013, 2014; Schnurr, 2019; Myers et al, 2020).
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I delineated four key factors to causally understand the process of market integration of
smallholders. First was the characteristics of soils, climate, and water in marginal
agroecological areas (Rao, 2008). Second, the credit/debt relations that farmers entered with
creditors to finance agricultural investments (Ramprasad, 2019). Third, I examined the role of
market intermediaries in credit, technology, and extension services as replacement of
governments in driving agricultural commercialisation in a liberalised setting (Aga, 2019).
Finally, was the role of governments in facilitating market integration in agriculture via both
scaling back public sector provision of inputs, credit and irrigation in welfare and subsidy
supports (Harriss-White, 2020).
Political ecology and agrarian political economy scholars have looked at these four factors in
different combinations in analysing adverse agricultural liberalisation in developing countries
(Taylor, 2011; Green, 2019; Natarajan et al, 2019) but this thesis argues that the conjugated
axes along which they interact is important, as well as emphasising market intermediaries at
the centre of the process of agricultural liberalisation and technology adoption (Jan and Harriss-
White, 2019).
The reasons for selecting the intersection of the four factors in the Liberalised Green
Revolution framework were as follows. Political ecology scholars have found that agricultural
intensification in marginal areas can be adverse as the soil, water and climatic conditions are
unconducive to prolonged intensification (Watts, 1983).
Second, I observed that credit was key to financing agricultural investments for cash poor
smallholders in developing countries. The common process through which this occurred are
interlocked factor markets, where farmers buy investments on informal credit to finance
technology and in exchange, sell their produce at a fixed price back to the intermediary (Jaleta
et al, 2009). However, in marginal settings, political ecology scholars have termed the process
of “reproductive squeeze” to describe how the more farmers proceed with agricultural
intensification, the more they increase environmental degradation and are kept within debt
relations to intermediaries over time due to unrealised incomes from crop investments (Gerber,
2013; Green, 2019; Vasquez, 2020). In a context of rising household expenses under economic
liberalisation for smallholders, they also entered market relations at the household level for
education, health, and consumption too (Luna, 2019). To afford these, farmers continued to
grow commodity crops as the only economically viable option relative to subsistence crops.
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Third, I argued that market intermediaries under economic liberalisation in developing
countries replaced the government in credit, technology, and extension services due to public
sector cutbacks as the important propagator of agricultural commercialisation (Bergius et al,
2019). Following a profit ethos, each intermediary served to increase provision of credit, inputs
or irrigation and provide extension advice to facilitate farmer adoption (Glover, 2007; Aga,
2019). In this way, intermediaries promoted agricultural technologies to smallholder farmers
in difficult growing environments, but often yields never matched the investments in inputs,
leaving farmers unable to repay cumulative interest repayments (Schnurr, 2012). This
reinforced a “reproductive squeeze”, forcing farmers to sell assets to cope or double down on
commodity crop cultivation in hope that the high market price pays off (Gray and Dowd-Uribe,
2013).
Finally, governments under economic liberalisation acted as facilitators of markets as part of
an economic development agenda to increase economic growth. In developing country
contexts, governments played contradictory roles of stepping back to enable market
intermediaries to function in deregulated markets, but also stepping forward to enact welfare
policies to appease voter groups. This amounted to what Sanyal (2008) called “welfare
governmentality”, which was to enact palliative welfare policies to stem crises in agriculture
while keeping the rubric of commodification as the normative goal. Examples such as cash
transfer programmes, electricity and fertiliser subsidies and disbursal of formal credit alongside
agricultural commercialisation are examples of these in developing countries (Demirguc-Kunt
et al, 2018; Natarajan et al, 2019; Norberg, 2020).
Putting these four together, I explained that technology adoption in particular marginal
environments could result in negative long term outcomes for smallholder farmers in yields
and indebtedness, requiring them to engage in non-farm livelihoods to cope with
unremunerative agricultural livelihoods. This is a theoretical distinction from agricultural
modernisation theorists modelling linear increases in agricultural productivity once market
conditions and agricultural technologies are adopted, causing structural transformation and
economic growth as the economy shifts from agrarian to industrialisation (Byerlee et al, 2005;
De Janvry, 2010). Also, I expand on agrarian political economy scholars’ characterisation of
“deagrarianisation” as the process where subsistence farmers are forced to abandon agriculture
from being unable to meet rising household expenses, making them rely on non-farm incomes
to support themselves (Bernstein, 2010; Ellis, 2010; Bryceson, 2019). Instead, I argue that after
subsistence farmers adopt cash crops to become commercial farmers, the long-term outcomes
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from unsuitable technology adoption can in some instances drive up indebtedness, and lower
relative incomes compared to cultivation costs, forcing a reliance on non-farm livelihoods.
The following sections highlight the key findings from the thesis, situating them within the
theoretical and empirical literature in order to answer the research questions posed in Chapter
1 of the thesis.
7.3 Technology adoption, agricultural commercialisation, and long-term farming
outcomes
The thesis explored the Liberalised Green Revolution in India through the case studies of Bt
cotton and tubewell irrigation adoption in Telangana, both high capital and input intensive
private sector technologies that took off in the 1990s and 2000s for their high market price and
ability to increase crop yields (Rao, 2008; Flachs, 2019). After the country liberalised its
economy, these were adopted rapidly in often difficult semi-arid and hard rock aquifer
conditions by smallholder farmers. The key reason I argued was the proliferation of private
sector credit, irrigation and input firms that promoted technologies to farmers, along with
governments that facilitated market adoption (Vakulabharanam, 2004; Vasavi, 2019; 2020).
In the case of Telangana, Chapter 4 and Chapter 5 found support to some of the arguments
made by agricultural liberalisation’s proponents of private sector led agricultural
commercialisation. The Liberalised Green Revolution was successful in rapidly increasing
technology adoption amongst smallholder farmers through decentralised market competition.
In particular, the increase in availability of flexible, informal credit to finance Bt cotton and
tubewell investments helped adoption (Parthasarathy, 2013; Vakulabharanam and Motiram,
2014). Compared to the original Green Revolution which targeted specific classes of farmers
with favourable loans and subsidies (Lerche, 2011), private market competition expanded the
access to agricultural technologies to smallholder farmers in the most marginal of areas in
Telangana (Stone and Flachs, 2018).
In Chapter 4, I showed that cotton area in Telangana increased rapidly with the introduction of
Bt cotton in 2002. Between 1955 and 2002, cotton area only increased by 5x from ~100,000
ha to 500,000 ha, but from 2002 to 2019, Bt cotton increased the crop area to almost 2 million
ha, a 4x increase in under 20 years, driven mostly by the 85% of Telangana’s population of
smallholders (DES Andhra Pradesh, 2006; DES Telangana, 2016; DES India, 2019a, b). This
made Bt cotton the single biggest crop by area in Telangana at 33% of the cropping area (ibid).
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In Kacharam, a largely subsistence village in 2000, Chapter 4 showed that Bt cotton adoption
was adopted by 100% of the 105 farming households in the village in two decades since its
entry, financed entirely by informal credit. Additionally, the switch to commercial crops by
smallholders in Kacharam to Bt cotton in Chapter 4 fetched 5-6x the market price of
subsistence crops such as sorghum and millets at $58-$73, matching figures by Dhanagare
(2016) in the literature.
In initial years, yields from Bt cotton in Kacharam were higher than the cost of cultivation,
bringing profits and welfare spill overs such as greater consumption of durable goods than with
subsistence farming (Kathage and Qaim, 2012). Beyond the Indian context, we also find in
South Africa and Burkina Faso that favourable credit terms and interlocked factor markets
rapidly increased smallholder adoption and incomes of Bt cotton in semi-arid areas initial
years. In South Africa, Schnurr (2012) finds that adoption increased from 7% to 90% between
2000-2002, whereas in Burkina Faso, smallholder Bt cotton adoption increased to 70%
between 2008-13 and increased household profit by 51% from 2008 to 2011 relative to local
cotton varieties (Dowd-Uribe and Schnurr, 2016).
Similarly, with tubewell irrigation, the Liberalised Green Revolution saw prices decline from
the equivalent of $10,000 for rudimentary tubewells in 1978 in India that could only extract
water up to 50m (Freed and Freed, 2002), to costing $800-$1500 in 2019 for superior
submersible pump tubewells that could extract water from up to 150m depth (MoWR, 2017).
In Kacharam, groundwater was only adopted by 10 farmers in the village previously due to its
price, but Chapter 5 showed that the expansion of credit and private irrigation firms increased
adoption to 69 out of 105 (65%) households, enabling farmers to grow rice for the household.
This is supported in wider literature by Reddy (2020a) in Telangana who showed that tubewell
pump ownership increased by 14x between 1975 and 2011 and at an India level that
groundwater produces $8 billion a year in GDP for agriculture through improved yields (Shah,
2010). Similarly, in dryland Jordan in the 1980s and 1990s, groundwater irrigation of high
value crops increased profits for smallholder farmers rapidly (Al Naber and Molle, 2017). In
this regard, agricultural liberalisation’s proponents were correct in predicting private market
competition increasing technology availability, access, reduced costs and improving incomes
via higher productivity and high market prices for commercial crops (Byerlee et al, 2008).
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However, Chapter 4 and 5 showed that economic liberalisation of the agricultural sector in
Telangana in the Liberalised Green Revolution did not produce long-term improvements in
yields or farmer incomes. This was primarily due to the context in which technological
intensification took place (Schnurr, 2017). In Kacharam, Chapter 4 showed that although Bt
cotton was adopted by 100% of farmers, yields and profitability collapsed within five years of
adoption, with 65% of all farmers in Kacharam making a loss from it in 2018. This agrees with
longitudinal studies by Kranthi and Stone (2020), over a similar period, who also reveal that
Bt cotton yields in Telangana and India overall stagnated since 2007. Chapter 4 therefore
refutes the claims made using panel studies between 2003-8 by Qaim et al (2009) that Bt cotton
increased yields, as the thesis takes a longer timeframe to study Bt cotton adoption. Similarly,
outside of India, Bt cotton in South Africa declined in yields by 90% between 1999 and 2011
and in Burkina Faso yields in the long-term improved only by 13% between 2009 and 2015,
despite an increase in cultivation costs by 65% (Schnurr, 2012; Luna and Dowd-Uribe, 2020;
Luna, 2020). This also resonated with Chapter 5, which found that despite 69 households
adopting tubewells, only 14% successfully irrigated crops through to harvest. Overall, 89% of
all 215 wells drilled in the village have failed in two decades. This is corroborated by other
studies in Telangana by Jacoby (2017) of 70-80% failure rates of tubewells drilled over time.
As a result of Bt cotton and tubewell adoption, Chapter 6 found that Bt cotton and tubewell
debts together made up the highest source of debt for 47% of farmers in Kacharam at $2200.
In the long run, the thesis found that Bt cotton and tubewells increased indebtedness from high
capital investments without the adequate return from farm incomes, making farmers rely on
non-farm incomes to survive. Therein, Chapter 6 refuted agricultural modernisation theorists
(Birner and Resnick, 2010) that technology adoption would kick start agricultural growth and
enable the structural transformation of an economy from the farm to the non-farm. In agreement
with Singh and Bhogal (2016)’s term of “distress induced transformation”, agricultural
intensification did not accelerate growth or the structural transformation from farm to the non-
farm. The shift in Kacharam instead occurred in as farmers were forced to rely on non-farm
incomes due to the persistence of Bt cotton harvest losses and aquifer depletion under semi-
arid agroecological settings and worsening monsoons and groundwater levels. This drove them
away from commercial agriculture out of distress.
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7.3.1 Explaining agrarian change in the Liberalised Green Revolution in India
Chapter 4 of the thesis argued that the agroecological setting of cotton adoption that was a main
factor voiced by farmers in Bt cotton outcomes, resulting in losses for 65% of all households
across class, caste, and gender of households. Semi-arid areas dominate Telangana’s
agricultural landscape, characterised by poor fertility, storage capacity red soils, unreliable
monsoons, frequent droughts, and high rates of evapotranspiration from rainfall (Gine et al,
2008). Investing in an input and capital-intensive crop such as Bt cotton increased per acre
costs by 10x relative to non-Bt cotton in India (Dhanagare, 2016). This was risky for
smallholder farmers to adopt as it was beholden to climate variability.
Chapter 4 found that declining monsoons over time caused Bt cotton losses for all groups,
overcoming social differentiation by class, caste, or gender. This agreed with studies in
Telangana by Dev and Rao (2007) between 2003-7, who also found cross cutting Bt cotton
problems in rainfed areas. More widely, the problems of rainfed Bt cotton are evident in all
India Bt cotton yield data, which show that rainfed Bt cotton states such as Telangana and
Maharashtra have the lowest yields in India (DES India, 2018). Looking beyond India, low Bt
cotton yields in Burkina Faso and South Africa due to rainfall variability were also key factors
in explaining increasing debts for smallholder farmers from losses in farm investments
(Schnurr, 2012; Gray and Dowd-Uribe, 2013). In a rainfed environment, farmers planted Bt
cotton immediately after the onset of the monsoon, to maximise the chances of rainfall across
the four-month growing season across the monsoon until September (Sharma et al, 2018).
However, monsoons in semi-arid areas were erratic in timing, quantity and consistency,
meaning that even if monsoons were delayed or reduced in a part of the harvest season of Bt
cotton, the crop would dry up.
Worsening monsoons experienced by farmers in Kacharam was also backed by longitudinal
monsoon data at Nalgonda district and Telangana levels showing a negative trendline in total
monsoon rainfall from 1950-2019 (DES Andhra Pradesh, 2006; DES Telangana, 2016; DES
Telangana, 2020). In addition, ethnographic work by Rao et al (2014) in two villages in
Mahbubnagar district in Telangana also found that farmer’s perceived monsoons to be arriving
later and having higher drought frequency between 2002-13, like the findings from Kacharam.
At an India level, rainfall variability is projected to lower Bt cotton production by 15 to 25%
by 2050, indicating that Bt cotton in rainfed growing environments is unsuitable for agricultural
intensification, especially given the high input costs (OECD, 2018).
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Nonetheless, the outcomes for Bt cotton was not only a function of the environment, but
political economy conditions too. As shown in Chapter 5, an original finding was that one of
the reasons why Bt cotton was rainfed was due to the siloed and profit maximising private input
dealers and tubewell irrigation firms. In a deregulated private market economy within the
Liberalised Green Revolution, private credit, seeds, inputs, and irrigation firms all sought to
maximise their own profits without complementarity, as farmers adopted tubewells and Bt
cotton but left the latter rainfed. This contrasted with the original Green Revolution as Byres
(1981) argues where inputs, seeds, credit, and extension services were all applied as a sum of
their parts to increase yields and production.
Although 65% of the village installed tubewells, Chapter 5 showed that farmers irrigated rice,
a household food crop, rather than Bt cotton, their main cash crop. In a political economy
context of agricultural liberalisation, the withdrawal of the public sector in extension services
left input and irrigation firms to provide extension advice to farmers on Bt cotton and tubewells.
Bt cotton firms advised farmers to keep reinvesting in the crop when it failed, due to erratic
rainfall. They suggested reinvesting with a different seed variety or combination of pesticides
and inputs, when the problem was growing Bt cotton in rainfed conditions in an unsuitable
semi-arid climate such as Telangana. This mirrors Aga’s (2018) findings of input firms pushing
different fertilisers and pesticides as solutions to problems while not addressing the structural
problems behind low yields.
Equally, Chapter 5 showed that tubewell irrigation firms also sought to maximise tubewell
sales, without advising farmers to irrigate Bt cotton, the main cash crop which faced persistent
yield problems in rainfed conditions. Chapter 5 deepened understanding of the rationale for
why Bt cotton was largely unirrigated in India. The Telangana government actively sought the
cropping pattern of rainfed Bt cotton and tubewell irrigated rice in the dry season, helping it
become the biggest dry season rice grower in India in 2020 (Tribune India, 2020). This is
despite water consumption for rice alone making up 50% of total groundwater available in
India annually (Anupoju and Kambhammettu, 2020), and incentivising it in a semi-arid state
such as Telangana.
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This rationale of rainfed Bt cotton was also reflected in Nalgonda and Telangana where only
0-5% and 10-15% of cotton was irrigated respectively (DES Telangana, 2016; DES India,
2019a, b). This agrees with work by Sharma et (2018) who find that on average only 37% of
the total Bt cotton area is irrigated, leaving India with one of the lowest Bt cotton yields globally
(Gutierrez et al, 2020). As Glover (2010b) argues, Bt cotton’s proponents cited studies of
superior yields, but these results were premised on growing it in irrigated conditions. As we
have shown in Chapters 4 and 5, Bt cotton is left rainfed due to the political economy
environment of profit maximising private sector firms and the absence of the government in
regulating or acting as an alternative arbiter of extension advice. This means despite the high
market price most farmers cannot achieve profits due to growing it in rainfed and semi-arid
conditions.
The cropping and irrigation patterns in Kacharam had a quartet of intersecting effects in the
Liberalised Green Revolution, leading to Bt cotton, rice and tubewell failures and increased
indebtedness for farmers. Tubewell firms pushed tubewells to farmers in a hard rock
environment, combined with semi-arid climatic conditions. Drilling into hard rock aquifers is
unpredictable as groundwater availability varies by area and depth, so aquifers can take
multiple attempts to locate a working groundwater source, costing $400-$500 each time
(Blakeslee et al, 2020). Finally, aquifer storage is also shallow in hard rock aquifers, meaning
they can be depleted quickly if extraction exceeds recharge from monsoon rainfall (Sishodia et
al, 2016).
Chapter 5 showed that as the number of farmers installing tubewells increased in the village, it
drove up tubewell densities at the advice of tubewell firms. Farmers competed for scarce
groundwater in the shallow storage hard rock aquifers, which depleted at a faster rate than were
recharged. Well density increases in Kacharam lowered the groundwater table to such an extent
that aquifers became depleted, and the more wells farmers drilled the less water was available
for everyone. As each well failed, tubewell firms pushed farmers to drill deeper and for more
wells as a solution. In the process, it made it more profitable for them if a well failed as it kept
a repeat customer coming back.
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By the time fieldwork ended in Kacharam in July 2019, only 24 wells were working out of 215
drilled overall in the village since 2000, a failure rate of 89%. This is worse than studies into
hard rock aquifers in semi-arid Telangana by Jacoby (2017), who found well failure rates of
75%. Previously, it was possible to irrigate rice in the village as the densities were lower but
now the competitive drilling for groundwater in a worsening monsoon made farmers unable to
do so. This was also coupled with laterite soils in Kacharam which had a low infiltration and
storage capacity so rather than the monsoon recharging aquifers most of the rainfall evaporated.
Looking beyond the Indian context, unsustainable groundwater extraction for water intensive
olive cash crops in semi-arid Jordan since the 1980s was supported by electricity subsidies and
government policies to expand irrigated agriculture in arid conditions. This caused widespread
well failure, pushing extraction rates to between 179% and 242% beyond safe limits (Al Naber
and Molle, 2017).
Tubewell adoption maximised sales for private firms but increased well failures and left
farmers unable to grow both rice and Bt cotton. Moreover, Chapter 5 showed depletion was
distributed across class, caste and gender of the household heads, meaning that richer farmers
could afford to drill more wells, but they were equally affected by the semi-arid climate, hard
rock aquifers and increasing tubewell densities. This finding is original and a contrast to class
and caste differentiation in outcomes found in the literature by Birkenholtz (2009) in Rajasthan,
where lower caste farmers had fewer working tubewells as they could not afford to drill more
wells.
A key consequence of Bt cotton and tubewell outcomes in Chapters 4 and 5 was that it
worsened farmer indebtedness on high interest informal credit. Informal credit was preferred
to formal credit as the collateral requirements were minimal, crucial for smallholder farmers
with landholdings of <1 ha. Furthermore, whereas banks and microcredit required loans to be
paid back in full before issuing new ones, moneylenders would issue new loans without the
principle being repaid, as long as farmers repaid the interest annually. This preference of
farmers for informal credit is also shown by Ramprasad (2019) in Telangana who reports that
corruption, delays in credit disbursal and inflexible terms prevents farmers from using formal
credit even if they have access to it. Yet, informal credit came with a high interest rate of 24%
to 36% annually in exchange for flexible credit terms.
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In an original finding, I showed in Chapters 4 and 5 that the choice of farmers to irrigate rice,
versus Bt cotton meant there was no way to get higher yields and benefit from the high market
price from Bt cotton or repay debts from crop or irrigation investments. Farmers kept
reinvesting in Bt cotton and tubewells at the advice of private firms, but using the technologies
separately worsened indebtedness for them. This contrasts with studies in Telangana by Taylor
(2013a) who found that farmers adopted tubewells for irrigated agriculture but environmental
conditions intensified harvest losses and trapped them in a cycle of debt. In Kacharam on the
other hand, the logic of leaving Bt cotton rainfed and rice irrigated left farmers worse off on
both fronts.
If a harvest resulted in losses for farmers, they had to repay the interest and extend loans for
another year or find other means to repay input loans, e.g. selling assets. However, farmers
were compelled to keep growing Bt cotton out of desperation to recoup their losses, once again
risking further harvest failure. In fact, Telangana has one of the highest indebtedness rates in
India as well as cultivation costs per acre, partly due to to Bt cotton being the highest cropped
area of all crops in the state (NSSOa, 2013; Reddy, 2014; DES India, 2018). A similar pattern
was also found with Bt cotton adoption in rainfed Burkina Faso and South Africa, where
increasing debts from poor yields amidst erratic rainfall forced farmers to sell assets or reinvest
in Bt cotton again, as it was the only crop with a high enough market price to repay debts and
household expenses (Schnurr, 2012; Gray and Dowd-Uribe, 2013; Luna, 2019).
This was relative to the Green Revolution, where governments in India issued favourable low-
cost loans and subsidies to large holder farmers in fertile areas to grow high yielding crops and
install groundwater irrigation (Subramanian, 2015). In a bad harvest, the subsidies and loans
offered would ameliorate the losses (Stone, 2019). In the Liberalised Green Revolution,
smallholder farmers invested in agricultural technologies at full market prices in a semi-arid
environment and with high-risk, high-interest informal credit, so a harvest loss or aquifer
failure was felt far more severely. This has been extensively found in the Telangana context
by Ramprasad (2017), who explains that smallholder farmers are often trapped in cycles of
debt to moneylenders and input dealers through commercial crop cultivation.
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Chapter 4 and 5 found that governments in the Liberalised Green Revolution were at once
absent in extension services for crops and irrigation, in regulating market intermediaries or
water/electricity use for groundwater, but interventionist in energy subsidies for groundwater
and expanding formal credit. The former vastly outweighed the latter in worsening smallholder
outcomes in marginal areas.
In Chapter 4, the absence of governments in inputs, irrigation or extension services left farmers
in Kacharam to rely on input and irrigation firms for buying their products and taking extension
advice. Aga (2018) notes the same conflict of interest problem in Maharashtra with the profit
maximising synergistic roles of input dealers as creditor, salesperson, and extension advisor.
This increased the revenue streams for input firms, while increasing indebtedness for farmers
as agricultural intensification continued in climatically extreme environment. These findings
contrast with proponents of interlocked markets, who argue that they are a win-win situation
for both farmers and intermediaries (Swain, 2000). In Kacharam, market intermediaries spread
technologies to unsuitable environments, so yields were never realised, and farmers were
unable to repay their investment costs (Taylor, 2013b). In addition, the availability of input
firms at all times by phone or in person relative to government extension officers made farmers
depend on intermediaries. In the nearby town of Devarakonda for example, there was only one
extension agent for the whole sub-district level, compared to 15 input dealers in the town. This
ever-present availability of Bt cotton input dealers was also evident in Warangal district in
Telangana in studies by Stone and Flachs (2018).
For tubewells, Chapter 5 showed that the absence of the government in monitoring or pricing
electricity or water use was due to the transaction and political costs of regulating tubewells.
Chapter 5 revealed that in Nalgonda district only one or two hydrogeologists were responsible
for much of the groundwater monitoring. This was confirmed by Mukherji and Shah (2005) in
Gujarat and by Pahuja et al (2010) in Andhra Pradesh. They found that hydrogeology
departments were largely understaffed, had limited jurisdiction and were confined to
measurement and scientific testing of wells, rather than to provide irrigation extension advice
directly to farmers (ibid).
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Like with Bt cotton, irrigation extension advice in Kacharam was provided by private irrigation
firms that also sold farmers their tubewells, presenting a conflict of interest. This finding is
novel, as private irrigation firms in India have not been studied in the literature yet except by
Birkenholtz (2007) and Vasavi (2020). When wells failed, farmers went to private irrigation
firms who encouraged them to deepen their wells or drill new ones. They received the fixed
cost of the well from the farmer whether the well worked or not. The understanding that
groundwater could be found by drilling deeper also went against the hydrogeological science
of hard rock aquifers which showed that water in aquifers was only found in localised fractures
in the rock of up to 15-80m depths (CGWB Telangana, 2017).
The advice to deepen wells to strike water therefore only increased drilling costs and debts and
did not yield water. Chapter 5 showed that the key lubricant of this chaotic system was the flow
of credit enabled by local moneylenders, who benefited from a parasitic relationship with
farmers of extracting interest. In the context of smallholder coffee farming in Colombia,
Vasquez (2020) demonstrates in a similar manner how agricultural commercialisation failures
have kept farmers in debt relations with creditors. Despite frequent Bt cotton low yields and
aquifer depletion, farmers could keep loading up the debt to cover their expenditure, keeping
afloat year on year by paying the interest on their loans to moneylenders, but in an unviable
position where they cannot afford to repay.
While the government was absent in regulation or monitoring of tubewells, it was at the same
time ever present in electricity subsidies. In 2014, 92% of the 2m tubewells in Telangana were
powered by electricity (MoWR, 2017), supported by electricity subsidies. For groundwater
users in Kacharam, this had the effect of placing a zero-marginal cost of pumping groundwater
in a water stressed environment, as farmers maximised water extraction for their crops
whenever water was available, driving up well densities, depletion and indebtedness, making
farmers rely on non-farm incomes to make ends meet like in findings in Karnataka by Blakeslee
et al (2020).
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Environmental, credit/debt relations, market intermediaries and governments left smallholders
in semi-arid Kacharam with stagnating incomes, and high debts from lost Bt cotton and
tubewell investments. Chapter 6 found therefore that farmers in Kacharam stopped relying on
farming as their primary income and pursued non-farm livelihoods as a distress led response
to unrealised incomes from commercialisation. Rather than the agricultural modernisation
theory of agricultural intensification driving structural transformation of the economy towards
industrialisation (Da Corta and Venkateshwarlu, 1999), the thesis revealed that the transition
from farm to the non-farm was sought out of crisis from agriculture.
Chapter 6 showed that non-farm incomes make up 39-70% of household incomes in Kacharam,
the most important source of income. This echoed trends at an India level as Chand et al (2017)
found that up to 65% of household incomes for farming households came outside of agriculture,
as agriculture is no longer remunerative. In Telangana, this is shown by the fact that agriculture
in Telangana is the primary employer at 55% of the workforce, but the gross value added
(GVA) contribution is less than 13% in 2020 (DES Telangana, 2020). However, the thesis
refutes agrarian political economy scholars who argue that subsistence farmers are the primary
class of farmers exiting agriculture under economic liberalisation (McMichael, 2009; Li, 2009).
Instead, I argue that many smallholder farmers who entered agricultural commercialisation in
semi-arid India are leaving agriculture because of the financial insecurity from commercial
farming.
Seeking a solution in the non-farm sector, Chapter 6 showed that elder generations of farming
households indebted themselves by investing in their children’s education for a salaried job
and not face the difficulties in the Liberalised Green Revolution that they faced. Reflecting
this, almost 53% of youth in Kacharam aged 15-29 were educated to at least a 10th grade
education, in comparison to only 5% in their parents’ generation. Chapter 6 showed both older
and younger generations aspired towards non-farm livelihoods, with parents actively
preventing their children from farming to focus on their education. This was also because they
knew their children could never cope with the economic risks or skills needed for commodity
farming (Jakimow, 2016).
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However, in an original finding, Chapter 6 found in Kacharam that not only were agricultural
livelihoods insufficient, but non-farm incomes too. In agreement with Agarwal and Agrawal
(2017), Chapter 6 showed that non-farm opportunities in Kacharam was a distress led choice
by farmers out of limited options, despite non-farm work being low paid. Farmers earned $3-7
per day from work such as agricultural and construction labour. This finding is in line with
authors such as Rahman and Mishra (2019) who argue that much of India’s growth post-
liberalisation, non-farm growth has been immiserating. However, Chapter 6 claimed that even
the younger generation worked in menial work, such as autorickshaw drivers, input shop
assistants and car drivers. These jobs paid more than their parents, but were regarded as
undesirable by the younger generation, so rural youth often were unemployed or dropped out
of the labour market altogether. In Kacharam, over 50% of degree graduates were unemployed,
much greater than the Indian rural youth unemployment level of 17% in 2018 (Mehrotra and
Parida, 2019).
Chapter 6 showed that neither farm nor non-farm incomes were enough to meet farmers’ debt
and interest repayments from agriculture or household expenditure from medical expenses and
education. Annual interest repayments from Bt cotton and tubewell debts alone were $660 on
average, 31% of the entire annual household income for farmers in 2018 of ~$2100. Overall,
in the survey year 2018, household expenditures and interest repayments on debt from all
sources were $3415, compared to incomes of ~$2100, so households in Kacharam made a loss
of $1,337 in 2018. This is matched by state level figures in Telangana where 89% of farming
households are indebted, the second worst in India, and where debts have increased by 13x in
real terms between 2002 and 2013 for rural households (Reddy, 2014).
To deal with indebtedness problems, Chapter 6 revealed that farmers engaged in a number of
distress inducing activities to repay informal moneylenders, what I called “risk indebtedness
treadmills”. Farmers prioritised clearing their interest repayment to moneylenders annually as
the minimum for moneylenders to renew their loans for another year. Renewing loans meant
they could meet household expenditure in case of further harvest losses. For the moneylender,
they preferred for farmers to be in debt and interest repayments flowing rather than have them
default on loans or seize assets. This is something also found in work by Gerber (2013) with
palm oil cultivation in Indonesia. In Chapter 6, I expand on this parasitic relationship between
debt and interest to show a “risk indebtedness treadmill”, where farmers took drastic steps year
to year to just to meet the minimum interest repayment, without even touching their principal
amounts.
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Farmers for example took microcredit loans to repay interest for larger moneylender loans.
This paid off their short-term interest repayment but increased the overall debt burden. Distress
inducing debt strategies like these have also been found in work by Ramprasad (2019) in
Telangana. Additional strategies found in Chapter 6 included doubling down on Bt cotton
investments, with farmers having few other options to earn quick cash. This is also evident in
Gray and Dowd-Uribe’s (2013) work in Burkina Faso, of farmers in semi-arid areas doubling
down on Bt cotton in the face of indebtedness. Even though Bt cotton showed persistent
problems, a mixture of moneylenders keeping farmers afloat by renewing loans for further
input investments and the desperation for farmers to try their luck kept farmers coming back to
Bt cotton for the elusive golden harvest that would one day repay all debts and expenses. This
preponderance of farmers to keep taking risks despite fleeting rewards has also been evidenced
in Andhra Pradesh and Telangana in work by Maertens et al (2014).
The last option for farmers in Kacharam was to sell part of their land. Land was their biggest
asset, holding deep cultural and economic value for farmers despite their fortunes from
agriculture (Harriss and Jeyaranjan, 2014). In rural Telangana, land made up 71.3% of total
assets (NSSO, 2013d, e). Therefore, in medical emergencies or marriage, farmers sold parts of
their land to meet these expenses. This on the one hand brought cash but also reduced their
future landholding size, eroding their most valuable asset and collateral for future loans, as well
as Bt cotton incomes from smaller landholdings. The desperate strategies farmers engaged in
to survive represented the fallout of the Liberalised Green Revolution in the long term, added
on top of non-farm marginality, leaving dual problems for households in Kacharam to deal
with.
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7.4 Limitations
Despite the thesis making original contributions to the literature, the research was limited in a
few ways. First, the thesis focused on one village, Kacharam, and on one year of recall data in
2018. Hence, the experiences of Bt cotton, tubewell irrigation and non-farm livelihoods could
have been temporally or spatially specific to Kacharam. However, I remedied the limitation by
conducting interviews with farmers comparing farming outcomes from when they first adopted
Bt cotton, as well as five year and one year recall years in comparison to the survey year 2018.
In addition, the thesis found corroborating evidence in similar agroecological and
hydrogeological village settings in Telangana as well as other parts of India and other
developing countries within the Liberalised Green Revolution. This confirmed the findings
beyond the village setting in India.
Second, the thesis did not interview government agricultural extension officers, moneylenders,
or hydrogeologists in the fieldwork. In the case of the government officials, it was emblematic
of the absence of the government in agriculture in the Liberalised Green Revolution, as there
was just one extension officer and two hydrogeologists for the whole sub district block and
Nalgonda district, respectively. I was unable to meet or contact them by phone, compared to
input dealers who were widely available and willing to be interviewed. In the case of
moneylenders, informal lending was often done off the books, so moneylenders were not
willing to be recorded or interviewed in person. Instead, I gained extensive information from
farmers themselves of how the informal credit system worked.
Regarding youth unemployment and non-farm aspirations, I primarily interviewed household
heads and not explicitly the younger villagers. Although I gained many insights into what older
generations of farmers thought of their children’s future livelihoods and the challenges facing
them, getting insights from the younger generations themselves was missing. However,
numerous informal discussions with my research assistants, both degree graduates, and other
youth in the village during the fieldwork, provided many perspectives on agriculture and their
non-farm prospects. Moreover, younger generations of the households sat in during many
interviews and household surveys I conducted and added to the insights of their parents when
we discussed the intergenerational shifts in livelihoods outside of agriculture. These informal
discussions were recorded in notes, as part of my daily reflections from fieldwork and in audio
recordings if they sat in on interviews. Therefore, while they were not quoted in the thesis, they
did substantially inform the writing and the arguments made.
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7.5 Conclusion
This chapter has situated the findings of the thesis within the broader theory and empirical
context of the literature on agricultural modernisation and smallholder outcomes in marginal
areas. Engaging with the Liberalised Green Revolution theoretical framework in Chapter 2, the
thesis found that the agricultural commercialisation with Bt cotton and tubewells was unviable
in the long term, as shown by Chapters 4, 5 and 6. The thesis findings agreed about the private
sector increasing adoption and lowering technology prices. Yet, agricultural liberalisation
failed to improve farmer incomes over the long term or spark a productivity led structural
change in the economy in rural India.
The thesis found that four key theoretically and empirically interrelated factors in adverse
environmental conditions, intermediaries, market facilitating governments and high interest
and risk credit/debt relations combined to cause negative Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation
intensification. This agreed with political ecology and agrarian political economy scholars who
argued that the social and economic context in which agricultural technologies were adopted
were as important as the technologies themselves. The Liberalised Green Revolution in
Kacharam over the long-term increased indebtedness via Bt cotton and tubewell technologies,
forcing sales of assets in risk indebtedness treadmills and deagrarianisation. This discussion
chapter therefore showed that the theoretical and empirical findings from the thesis on the
Liberalised Green Revolution contested, expanded upon, and filled gaps in the literature. The
concluding chapter of the thesis, Chapter 8, will explore the implications of the thesis for
policy, research and political economy in India.
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Chapter 8 – Conclusion
8.1 Introduction
This conclusion chapter is broken into four sections. First, the chapter provides a brief summary
of the thesis. Furthermore, I compare and contrast the thesis findings with similar longitudinal
village studies carried out elsewhere in India to situate the research in Kacharam within broader
smallholder rainfed settings. I also postulate some tentative applications of the research beyond
India. Next, I discuss the policy implications of the thesis’ findings pertinent to the state of
Telangana and India more widely. Following this, I lay out the political economy implications
of the findings within the Telangana and Indian context. Finally, I provide policy
recommendations and highlight what work can be done in other parts of India and beyond to
extend and confirm the research findings from Kacharam for further research.
8.2 Thesis summary
The thesis found that Bt cotton and tubewell irrigation failed to increase incomes in a sustained
manner in the long term in Kacharam and Telangana in a semi-arid and hard rock aquifer
environment, leading to rising indebtedness, diminishing returns from agriculture and the
transition to non-farm livelihoods to survive. Although seeing initial gains, the input and capital
intensive Bt cotton was grown in rainfed conditions that witnessed more erratic and declining
monsoons over time, causing frequent harvest failures and increasing indebtedness for farmers
in the long run across castes, classes and genders. Similarly, the capital intensive tubewell was
adopted in unsuitable hard rock aquifer settings. Initial gains from rice cultivation came in the
first few years but increasing tubewell densities in the villages exacerbated groundwater
decline in the village, causing frequent tubewell failures in the long run. The failure of the
Liberalised Green Revolution forced farmers to seek non-farm livelihoods to survive.
However, the thesis found that structural problems in the labour market in India meant non-
farm livelihood opportunities were low paid and insecure, insufficient to meet debt obligations
and household expenses. This forced farmers into “risk indebtedness treadmills”, where they
engaged in short term cash strategies to sustain debt repayments and renew loans to finance
household expenses. This included doubling down on Bt cotton, selling land or stacking loans
from microcredit and bank loans to repay informal creditors.
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The thesis found that market intermediaries were key in promoting Bt cotton to marginal areas,
providing credit, inputs, seeds and extension to farmers, financing inputs and seeds on credit
in interlocked factor markets and buying the harvest from farmers. In an unregulated Bt cotton
market however, they failed to advise farmers to irrigate Bt cotton, posing different seeds and
input solutions instead when farmers faced harvest losses, seeking to maximise input sales and
keep farmers within debt relations. Similarly, with tubewells, irrigation firms failed to advise
farmers to irrigate cotton, leaving farmers to imitate early adopters in the village and grow rice,
a household crop. This left Bt cotton, the main cash crop to be prone to erratic rainfall, bringing
reduced yields or harvest failures, while investments for tubewells were left unpaid by growing
household food crops. Debts from both technologies increased with repeated technology
failures, forcing farmers to seek cash from non-farm livelihoods to make up for losses.
Finally, the government was absent in regulating Bt cotton markets, facilitating market activity
from intermediaries. In tubewells, the Telangana government promoted tubewells for growing
rice in the village as part of their development vision to be the rice bowl of India via energy
subsidies. They were absent in irrigation extension advice however, leaving irrigation firms to
advise farmers to repeatedly drill in the face of well failures to maximise their own sales. The
thesis found that the social and economic context within which agricultural technology
adoption took place was a crucial factor in determining the success of the Liberalised Green
Revolution in Telangana. The mutually intersecting factors of agroecological conditions,
credit/debt relations and the roles of market intermediaries and governments, failed to increase
yields and incomes of smallholder farmer adopters in the long term in marginal settings, leading
to technology failure and unintentional adverse deagrarianisation, thereby critiquing the
assumption of market integration increasing agricultural growth and skilled non-farm
transitions.
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8.3 Comparing and contrasting the thesis findings within India and beyond
To compare and contrast the outcomes from Kacharam, I drew upon work by the Foundation
of Agrarian Studies (FAS), who have been conducting longitudinal village surveys on agrarian
change across numerous agroecological regions in India since 2005 as part of their “Project on
Agrarian Relations in India” (FAS, 2021). This allows comparisons of Bt cotton cultivating
villages with Kacharam across time and geography in India to see for differentiation in
outcomes, given Kacharam’s negative Bt cotton outcomes across classes, castes and gender
across a number of measures.
In initial years in two villages Kanzara and Warwat Khanderao in Vidharba region in
Maharashtra, Swaminathan and Rawal (2011) found Bt cotton net incomes to be 97% higher
than local cotton varieties at roughly $425 per hectare in 2007, despite the higher input costs.
However, only 10% of the total gross cropped area was monocropped by Bt cotton, that too
dominated by larger landholders who could afford the cultivation costs. For most smallholder
farmers in the villages, they found that intercropped Bt cotton in rainfed conditions had similar
returns to improved varieties of non-Bt cotton technologies, hence the economics in the long
run were not clear cut. In comparison to Kacharam, there was a clear class differentiation with
who grew Bt cotton as a monocrop, as in Vidharba it was dominated by large landholders, with
smallholder farmers intercropping Bt cotton with food crops to diversify their spatial and
temporal risk of drought. This indicates Kacharam’s farmers willingness to take the risk to
grow Bt cotton as a monocrop, but this has turned adverse without the returns in recent years.
Moreover, the initial gains from Bt cotton in this study also match Kacharam’s experience of
farmers enjoying much higher net incomes that incumbent crop choices.
In line with findings from Kacharam, Ramkumar and Raut (2011), also showed that 143 labour
days were required for Bt cotton per year, disaggregated into 105 for females and 38 for males.
Relative to non-Bt cotton, Bt cotton required more labour intensive tasks to harvest it, which
was centred on gendered labour. Women worked more on Bt cotton due to higher yields relative
to non-Bt cotton, so required more days of picking and hand weeding in the harvest season.
Men mostly engaged in ploughing, oxen weeding, spraying seeds, pesticides and
transportation, but each of these tasks are short in duration and are only required 1-2 times per
season.
220
However, these FAS papers were released in 2011 so did not cover the longitudinal time frame
that I investigated in my thesis. In later work though, they revealed stagnation or abandonment
of Bt cotton for other crops due to the tailing off net incomes from the crop relative to rising
input costs.
In Buldhana, a rainfed, smallholder, Bt cotton growing district in Maharashtra, Swaminathan
and Baksi (2017) found that 76% of smallholder farmers intercropped Bt cotton with sorghum
and millets. This was to ensure both cash crop cultivation and food security. In comparison,
only 55% of large farmers in Buldhana intercropped with food crops, and in other regions of
Maharashtra, Bt cotton was grown as a monocrop, but only by larger farmers (Swaminathan
and Rawal, 2011; ibid). In the overall sample by FAS however, Bt cotton was the only rainfed
cash crop grown in their study. Relative to Kacharam therefore, we see important continuities
and divergences. The phenomenon of growing Bt cotton in rainfed conditions seems to hold
across other states in India outside of Telangana, which carries with it the risk of drought and
harvest failure shown in the thesis in Kacharam. However, in research by FAS in Maharashtra
at least, the practise of intercropping by smallholder farmers diversifies risk and food security
better than in Kacharam, with only larger farmers willing to grow Bt cotton as a cash crop
given their better collateral and risk absorption capacity.
In another study by Ramakumar et al (2017), they conducted longitudinal village studies
between 2006-2014 in two districts in the Vidharba region in Maharashtra. In one village in
Dongargaon, they found that Bt cotton yields increased rapidly from 195kg/ha to 356kg/ha
between 2001-2014, matching the increases in Kacharam and Telangana. This led to a
declining cropping area for sorghum, as Bt cotton covered 41% of the village in 2007, chosen
for its high productivity and market prices. However, by 2014, Bt cropping area declined to
6%, replaced by soybean and pigeon pea. In another village Savali, Bt cotton was replaced by
maize and soybean. The biggest reason for the abandonment of Bt cotton were the rising
cultivation prices in inputs and labour, relative to the market price and high credit repayment
costs from informal creditors (ibid).
Like in Kacharam, frequent yield shocks created economic losses and risks for farmers they
could not bear given the unremunerative market prices. Pesticide, seed, fertiliser and labour
costs per acre all increased from 2006 to 2014 faster than the market price, in an environment
of inadequate rainfall in the region. Finally, farmers chose maize and soybean for their shorter
3-month crop cycles and ability to intercrop with household food crops unlike Bt cotton which
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could only be cropped with pigeon pea due to its longer growing season. Whereas farmers in
Kacharam persisted with Bt cotton despite similar problems exhibited as in Maharashtra,
Ramakumar et al (2017) found that farmers quickly switched to an intercropped system of
growing short season maize and soybean for cash with food crops such as sorghum and pigeon
pea. The reasons for leaving Bt cotton were similar to Kacharam, in the high cultivation costs
relative to returns in the long run, under an environment of erratic rainfall and high credit costs.
This confirms the problems faced by farmers in Kacharam in this thesis.
The theoretical and empirical findings from the thesis also have tentative implications for wider
settings beyond India. With Bt cotton, the long-term indebtedness, declining yields, and
adverse outcomes from adoption as shown in India have also been evident in some similar
smallholder semi-arid contexts in South Africa and Burkina Faso. Political ecologists have
demonstrated the rapid adoption and abandonment of Bt cotton in Burkina Faso from 2008-16,
where rising debts, low yields in rainfed settings caused farmers to stop growing Bt cotton, as
well as a countrywide ban (Dowd-Uribe and Schnurr, 2016). Similarly, Schnurr (2012) finds
in South Africa that Bt cotton saw initial yield increases in semi-arid smallholder settings since
its inception in the early 2000s, but by 2011, low yields and rising indebtedness caused farmers
to abandon the crop. Nonetheless, GM crops continue to be presented as a food security and
agricultural modernisation solution for the African continent as part of an “African Green
Revolution”, (Moseley et al, 2017; Schnurr, 2019) spreading to a further four countries since
South Africa and Burkina Faso, with Mozambique and Kenya at late stages of GM cassava and
maize approvals (ISAAA, 2019). Overall, GM crops are already being planted across 24
developing countries, with pending regulatory approvals pushing the figure closer to 70 (ibid).
Furthermore, Sub-Saharan Africa is also being targeted as the new untapped rainfed
smallholder area to expand groundwater intensification, with 40% of the continent classified
as dryland and rainfall volatility common across the continent (Cobbing and Hillier, 2019).
World groundwater consumption for agriculture has tripled since the 1960s, contributing to
43% of irrigation consumption (Siebert et al, 2010; Wada et al, 2012). Given the sheer size and
scale of marginal farming areas globally, where 1.5 billion people live and covering 40% of
the global land area, the prospect of agricultural intensification by policymakers in these areas
has been regarded as tantamount to a blank canvas to transform, especially with drought
resistant GM crop strains and expanding irrigation (Sharma et al, 2014; Lall et al, 2020).
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Like with India however, the cycle of environmental decline, rising indebtedness, failure of
technology adoption and potential distress induced non-farm transitions risks repeating itself,
as the model of agricultural intensification in the 21st century continues to ignore the fragility
of resource base and the affordability of such crops for environments. With climate change set
to worsen droughts, floods and rainfall variability in marginal agrarian settings globally (Li et
al, 2020), this presents a risky scenario for farmers to become integrated into markets and take
on similar economic and environmental risks as Bt cotton and tubewell adopting farmers did
in India. For instance, scholars such as Natarajan et al (2019) have proposed a “climate
precarity approach” using the example of Cambodia to describe the mutual effects of increasing
climate risks and rising debts from agricultural technology adoption failures that drive farmers
into debt bondage in non-farm livelihoods to recoup losses.
8.4 Policy implications for Telangana and India
Despite the plethora of environmental and economic risks that have evidently trapped certain
smallholders within adverse agricultural commercialisation in Telangana, the ideological
fixation with private sector technologies such as Bt cotton for economic growth persists. Policy
makers at the Telangana and India level continue to push Bt cotton as a flagship technology to
replicate with other crops. The Telangana Chief Minister KC Rao for example in 2020 began
plans to link welfare eligibility for cash transfers with the increased acreage of Bt cotton in the
state, as part of a new “Regulated Crop Policy” (New Indian Express, 2020a: p1), stating in an
article:
“Chief Minister K Chandrasekhar Rao on Thursday said those farmers who cultivate
crop as per the direction of the Telangana government would get the full Ryuthu
Bandhu [cash transfer scheme]. The Chief Minister said the intention of the government
is for farmers to cultivate crops which are in demand and get attractive prices for their
yield. “The farmers will not face losses if they grow crops as per the suggestions given
by the state government” he said. Rao said that [Bt] cotton should be cultivated in
[2.8m] hectares in both [monsoon] and [dry] seasons together, [up from 2.1m hectares
currently].”
The emphasis on Bt cotton and GM crops more widely has also been part of the agricultural
policy agenda of the Indian government. This is shown by their premier thinktank, the NITI
Ayog, celebrating Bt cotton’s purported success and stressing the need for further GM crop
approvals to ensure economic growth (NITI Ayog, 2015).
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This is evident for example in the flagship agricultural policy programme of the current BJP
government from 2018, titled “Doubling Farmers Income”. This aims to increase the real
annual incomes of farmers from $1,555 in 2016 to $3,100 in 2023 (Gulati et al, 2020). The
primary vehicle used by the government to achieve this is to deregulate agricultural markets
and trade, emphasise the expansion of Bt cotton and other biotechnology crops, gain
investments from FDI and increase the role of the private sector in agricultural output markets
(Chand, 2019).
With regards to irrigation, despite the risks presented by groundwater intensification in semi-
arid and hard rock areas, policy continuities persist at the Telangana level and beyond to
promote the cultivation of unviable water intensive crops such as dry season rice via tubewells.
For instance, Telangana became the biggest dry season rice grower in India in 2020 at 10m
tonnes (News Minute, 2020), largely due to the expansion of their 24x7 free electricity scheme
for groundwater. This is even though rice cultivation alone accounts for 50% of total
groundwater withdrawal in India per year, let alone other water intensive cash crops such as
sugarcane (Anupoju and Kambhammetu, 2020).
This perverse policy serves as both a development vision for the Chief Minister KC Rao to
demonstrate Telangana’s technological superiority and as a political vote winner amongst the
tubewell farmer base. The budget for electricity subsidies has doubled from $541m in 2018-19
to $1bn in 2020-21 for Telangana (Telangana Today, 2020), due to the burgeoning demand
from the 2.3m tubewells which are only set to increase in the future, reinforcing the nexus of
electricity subsidies at the cost of long term economic and aquifer sustainability. Although
recent efforts have been made in Telangana to increase canal irrigation coverage and restore
reservoirs and tank irrigation for conjunctive use with tubewells, these are undermined by the
fact that electricity policy continues in the state (Verma and Shah, 2019; Tribune India, 2020).
At the India level too, electricity subsidies have more than tripled from $3.5bn in 2000 to
$10.5bn in 2020 (OECD, 2018), indicating the political saliency to introduce these schemes in
several states in India beyond Telangana. Furthermore, in the 9 most heavily subsidised
tubewell states in India where electricity costs are <$5 per MWh, aquifer overexploitation and
density of deep tubewells per square km is the highest in India, including in Telangana (Rajan
et al, 2020). At this rate of groundwater depletion and tubewell expansion aided by subsidies,
India is currently predicted to permanently dry out 60% of current aquifer capacity by 2025
(ibid). This is not to mention the effects of climate change, which are set to reduce monsoon
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recharge of aquifers through increasingly erratic distribution and quantity of rainfall (Ferrant
et al, 2014).
For both Bt cotton and tubewells therefore the doubling down of technology adoption in
Telangana and India seems to continue as a dominant policy strategy. This reflects the
enmeshing of political and market ideals in the Liberalised Green Revolution no matter the
costs. Political and ideological ends by state and central governments supersede the mounting
micro-level longitudinal evidence of the long term adverse effects of decontextualized
agricultural commercialisation in dryland areas in India as shown in this thesis (Vasavi, 2019).
8.5 Political economy implications for Telangana and India
The outcomes from the Liberalised Green Revolution have unfortunately not had much of a
bearing with regards to the political economy of agriculture nor political responses by farmers
in Telangana. The nationwide farmer protests in India since 2020 have come in reply to the
passing of laws in relation to eventual abolishment of government regulated markets for
agricultural harvests, which purportedly give farmers the chance to sell their crops to private
market players such as corporations (Deccan Chronicle, 2020). The policy trajectory suggests
a further epoch of agricultural liberalisation in India, potentially ending current policies for
crops such as the minimum support price for rice and wheat (Himanshu, 2020). Unfortunately,
with regards to Kacharam, Bt cotton is a crop where markets have already been liberalised
since their introduction in 2002.
As shown in Chapters 2 and 4, Bt cotton is largely controlled by the private sector, with inputs,
credit, extension advice and output markets the remit of market intermediaries, outside of
government regulation and subsidies. This system in Kacharam as evidently shown in the thesis
has not borne fruitful results over the long term for smallholder farmers in dryland areas. Hence
the ongoing protests in India have little to do with the predicament facing farmers growing Bt
cotton. If anything, the experiments with a fully liberalised Bt cotton market in Kacharam
serves as a cautionary tale of the power relations that will accrue with the private sector
intermediaries at the local level if liberalisation reforms proceed in other parts of India and
other crops.
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Despite the prevailing trends of commercialisation in agriculture however, there are
alternatives emerging to the incumbent model of farming. Policy and practise on alternatives
to industrial farming in dryland areas has coalesced around the system of “sustainable
intensification”, which involve increase yields while also improving socio-ecological
conditions of the environment. These cover a broad spectrum of activities, including:
“crop varietal improvements, new rotations, water conservation, the system of crop
intensification (SCI), integrated pest management (IPM), agroforestry, conservation
agriculture (CA), crop diversification (e.g. rotations, intercropping, water harvesting)
and the intensification of small patches” (Bharucha et al, 2020: p3-4).
An evaluation of sustainable intensification across 20 countries has already suggested
improvements in crop yields, but limitations remain in making the system remunerative for the
cash needs for dryland smallholders (ibid). In India, early evidence of a major long-term vision
transition plan from commercial farming to more agroecologically suitable farming is found in
the Zero Budget Natural Farming (ZBNF) movement, pioneered by a farmer, Subash Palekar
in Maharashtra in the 2000s (Koner and Laha, 2020). Supported in speeches by the Finance
Minister Nirmala Sitharaman and Prime Minister Narendra Modi (Bharucha et al, 2020), ZBNF
at least in terms of discourse has been gaining traction in India in recent years. The key goal
behind this method of farming is to limit reliance on external chemical fertilisers, pesticides
and seeds through organic and naturally occurring plant and animal sources such as animal
manure, urine, anti-bacterial tree and plant species. It is composed of four steps, each geared
to reduce input costs and maintain productivity of crops:
1) increase the soil productivity by increasing microbial activity and organic matter
2) treat seedlings for protection against bacterial and fungal disease
3) mulching to increase organic matter and nutrients in soil
4) aerate soil for air and water (Gupta et al, 2020)
The emphasis of ZBNF is to implement farming practices to diversify risk by intercropping,
reduce input costs and improve soil fertility. ZBNF practices have benefited many farmers in
India since the 2000s, with the neighbouring state of Andhra Pradesh in 2018, the first in India
to implement ZBNF methods at a statewide level. The plan was to target 6m farmers and 8m
hectares with ZBNF farming by 2024 under their agricultural policy “Climate Resilient Zero
Budget Natural Farming” (Koner and Laha, 2020). The programme has been supported by the
UNEP, World Bank, and international NGOs to help farmers with regards to financing,
226
extension advice and logistical support, including a $14m donation by the Azim Premji
Foundation (Bharucha et al, 2020). By 2019, 13% or 204,000 ha had been converted to ZBNF
methods, planted by 523,000 farmers in 3015 villages (Smith et al, 2020).
In a study surveying the ZBNF cropping system in Andhra Pradesh, Bharucha et al (2020)
reveal that net incomes for rainfed cotton were INR 50,000 per ha for ZBNF compared to INR
30,000 per ha for non-ZBNF. Across rice, maize, cotton groundnut and millets in both rainfed
and irrigated conditions, they found that overall, yields increased by 17%, cost of cultivation
decreased by 23% and net incomes increased by 50% in ZBNF settings relative to non-ZBNF
(ibid). The main benefit has been the reduced cost of chemical fertiliser and pesticides in the
ZBNF programme, which reduced cultivation costs, positively affecting net incomes even if
yields were not much higher than in industrial farming. Finally, in their survey of ZBNF
farmers in Andhra Pradesh, Gupta et al (2020) note that ZBNF initiatives have been taken up
by farmers with on average higher education, with only 20% of the ZBNF cohort having no
education compared to 42% for the non-ZBNF group. They also found that the ZBNF cohort
were younger on average, better represented by women and lower castes than non-ZBNF, plus
58% of them already relied on non-farm income sources, compared to 49% for non-ZBNF
(ibid).
For Kacharam, this suggests a promising set of results for crops such as Bt cotton and millets,
with gains being evident in both rainfed environments as well as irrigated scenarios. Key to its
success in Andhra Pradesh however is the institutional infrastructure created by the Andhra
Pradesh government in setting up training programmes, NGO partnerships and self-help groups
and centralised funding by the state government (Veluguri et al, 2021). These have had a long
legacy in Andhra Pradesh in previous sustainable agricultural programmes in the state since
2004 in their Community Managed Sustainable Agriculture scheme (Ramanjaneyulu and Rao,
2008), which was designated within the Department of Rural Development. Building on these
arrangements therefore has been key to scaling up of ZBNF in Andhra Pradesh, so presents a
unique blueprint for success in this particular context, which may not be replicable in
Telangana (ibid).
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Similarly, in initial studies in rice cultivation in Purulia village in West Bengal in 2020, Koner
and Laha (2020) found that ZBNF farmers saw decreased yields per hectare of 20% relative to
intensive farmers in the control sample, but income per hectare increased by $21, due to the
savings in input costs. This region of Bengal featured shallow soil capacity, low rainfall and
low water retention of the soil. However, the authors did note that ZBNF was sponsored by the
government through natural pesticides and fertiliser supplies, hence inputs were subsidised
only after support from governments versus purchasing chemical inputs on credit in input
markets. This protected farmers from input costs, price fluctuation and indebtedness by being
subsidised by the government (ibid). This brings into question the financial sustainability of
this scheme in Kacharam given the lack of government policy to support farmers this way, as
the market for Bt cotton is entirely reliant on the private sector, and the Telangana government
has encouraged intensive cultivation through markets in recent years (DES Telangana, 2020),
but indicates that an alternative vision is possible in agriculture with the right political support.
8.6 Policy recommendations
A number of policy recommendations can be drawn out from the thesis. The critical finding
was the consideration of agroecological and hydrogeological factors for optimal cropping
patterns. The thesis showed that Bt cotton grown in rainfed conditions in is too risky and prone
to harvest failure, especially when considering Bt cotton is such an input and capital-intensive
crop. Farmers however, chose a rainfed crop such as Bt cotton for its relative market price
compared to other rainfed crops. The thesis therefore recommends policy makers to incentivise
farmers to switch away from Bt cotton. This can be to rainfed crops that can improve household
food security, as well as diversifying cropping patterns of rainfed crops suitable to the climate
and soils of Telangana. Scientists at ICRISAT for example have developed improved peanut,
chickpea and millet varieties that are drought and pest resistant (Kumar et al, 2014). These can
be important not only for household food security but fodder too for livestock.
Efforts in recent years by NGOs and policymakers have attempted to reintegrate drought
resistant food crop varieties such as millets into smallholder semi-arid and rainfed Indian farms.
Millets were traditionally grown as a food crop in rainfed areas for their low input costs and
drought resistant properties, forming an important source of food security for subsistence
households (Louis, 2015). Increasingly in previous decades however, as economic demands on
households have increased, millet cultivation in rainfed areas has declined in favour of cash
crops such as Bt cotton to meet expenses, as seen in Chapter 4 in Kacharam and in FAS’s work
228
in Maharashtra (Swaminathan and Baksi, 2017). In Telangana for instance, it dropped from
60% of the gross cropped area in the 1960s to 2% in 2017 (Reddy et al, 2017). In their research
in drought prone Ananthapur district in Andhra Pradesh, Fischer et al (2016) found that millets
were seen as culturally inferior foods and crops relative to rice, due to their low market prices,
taste, labour intensive processing and cultural association with historical poverty and low
status. However, they also found that extension support from NGOs on the nutritional
properties of millets, their use as fodder and short growing season incentivised farmers to
intercrop millets with groundnut, their cash crop, as millets was a fallback crop in drought
years. The supply of fodder also made farmers more likely to rely on livestock as a source of
income on the farm for milk, rather than as a further investment to make.
Fischer et al (2016) also report how recent resurgence of millets in urban India as a “superfood”
presents a new market niche to target in supermarkets in major cities in India such as Mumbai,
Hyderabad and Bangalore (ibid). Farmers can take advantage of the rising demand for healthy
eating in urban middle classes in India as a growing target market for millets. To overcome
market volatility, villages such as Kacharam can benefit from the state government setting a
minimum support price for millets in drought years and improve marketing and extension
channels to reach urban centres. By either selling them to government markets or urban food
value chains it can be a partial solution to shift away from Bt cotton. This would create an
output market for a crop suited to rainfed and semi-arid Telangana, plus give farmers an
economic incentive to plant drought resistant crops (ibid).
Furthermore, rather than the current “Regulated Crop Policy” in Telangana to increase Bt
cotton production, the Telangana government can instead link their Ryuthu Bandhu cash
transfer programme to growing agroecologically suited crops such as millets, which would not
only provide food security, fodder and diversify agro-climatic and economic risk, it would also
meet farmers need for cash for household expenses. The political trajectory within Telangana
however at present continues in the vein of promoting input intensive cash crop agriculture
however, as indicated by their plans to increase Bt cotton production and tubewell use for dry
season rice despite the environmental and economic problems shown in Kacharam.
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Perhaps the most difficult aspect is to change the incentives for input dealers as they benefit so
much from the Bt cotton market currently. One way to do this could be to scale up the extension
services and NGO support for farmers from the public sector, creating a viable alternative
source for seeds, inputs and extension support. The combination of the rainfed crop conditional
cash transfer scheme and the increase in support prices can also create the demand for input
dealers to start supplying the varieties themselves, if they sense a profit opportunity. This will
require a long-term strategy however with strong decentralised powers, skill training and
budgetary support at the district level in Telangana. This is due to the power that intermediaries
have currently and the chaotic nature of Bt cotton seed markets.
In the scenario of farmers continuing to grow Bt cotton, policy makers should consider
diversifying cropping patterns alongside Bt cotton in the dry season with rainfed food crops
mentioned above. This is instead of the current practice of growing rice in the dry season, which
is also unsuitable for the aquifer environment and climate of Telangana. Moreover, with this
shift, farmers can use precision irrigation such as drip for Bt cotton in the monsoon. This would
improve yields and allow a more stable water supply for Bt cotton than in rainfed conditions.
The culture and habit of irrigating rice however may take time to change farmer behaviour.
This would require a set of tools like increased extension supports, site visits, show farmers
and field demonstrations from NGOs and agricultural officers of drip irrigation and Bt cotton.
Using drip irrigation from groundwater can also reduce the overexploitation and demand on
the current aquifer systems. Finally, using improved varieties of cotton as Siddiqui (2020)
suggests can further increase yields and reduce water consumption. Open pollinated seed
varieties can be planted in higher densities and have a shorter growing season than Bt cotton
seeds in India currently. These open pollinated varieties are the preferred cotton strain in most
of the productive cotton producers in the world, so India can emulate the same path.
In terms of tubewell irrigation, several policy prescriptions, technological interventions and
community management have been tried at various stages of India’s groundwater history in
order to curb the worst effects of groundwater exploitation. From the technological perspective,
drip irrigation has been the most popular alternative posed. Drip irrigation is still based on
groundwater supply, but the flow is more control and precise to the roots of the crop, saving
up to 60% of water consumption per hectare (Narayanamoorthy, 2006). Recognising
groundwater irrigation’s poverty reduction role, Sishodia et al (2017) posit that introducing
drip irrigation to Andhra Pradesh’s groundwater users can cost $6bn, but will save water in the
long run, and make more efficient use of water in semi-arid and hard rock constrained
230
environments. Subsidies and conditional cash transfers can encourage farmer adoption of drip
irrigation.
However, criticisms of drip irrigation point out that stacking another technological fix onto
farmers is meaningless without changing the cropping patterns or behaviour of resource users.
Fieldwork in Morocco by Molle and Tanouti (2017) found that drip irrigation caused farmers
to expand irrigated area and changing to more water intensive crops, leading to higher water
use than before. The perception of water saving was outweighed by the increase in irrigated
area and cropping patterns, increasing the overall use. Other scholars point out that drip
irrigation obfuscates the social relations of its use and practical distributional issues such as
affordability and access (Venot et al, 2014). Therefore, drip irrigation if not implemented
properly falls into the same trap as tubewells, a technological fix to a decontextualised setting.
Another localised policy measure has been to introduce community management schemes for
groundwater, consisting of either sharing and pooling of wells for group use, informational and
awareness campaigns and game theory for groundwater governance. One such example in
Andhra Pradesh was the Andhra Pradesh Farmer Groundwater Management Scheme led by the
World Bank in the 2000s (Taylor, 2013). This was an NGO led, community driven approach
advocated for pooling groundwater resources, educated farmers on groundwater depletion and
trained them to monitor groundwater levels, with the end goal for farmers to self-regulate on a
voluntary basis through choosing less water intensive crops (ibid).
Collective management of groundwater at a village level is a step in the right direction, but can
only work in given settings. For example, Taylor (2013) notes, community management may
work in a harmonious fashion in times of ample rainfall but in drought periods, farmer
desperation for incomes and fear of harvest losses may induce them to overexploit
groundwater. The lack of alternatives and individual self-interest of avoiding hunger is a
priority at the individual level. Moreover, he raises questions over its sustainability if NGOs
withdrew from the scheme, leaving it in hands of the village hierarchy (ibid). Asymmetric
power relations of class, caste and gender may reconfigure who has to save water and who
doesn’t in the scheme, therefore community management may only be enforced for the poorest
and those with least power, relative to the dominant power group (ibid).
231
Work by Meinzen-Dick et al (2018) has tried to address this using game theory in groundwater
governance in Andhra Pradesh. Her fieldwork involved encouraging groundwater recharge by
farmers through managing their demand. Information sharing and awareness of the effect of
crop choice, rather than rainfall on groundwater development was discussed with farmers.
Experimental games where farmers learned in real time how changes in crop choice affect
water tables help improve farmer understanding at the individual and community level. For
collective decision making in reducing water use however, she noted that community cohesion,
trust, social structure and individual profit incentives of choosing alternative crops were crucial
(ibid).
Therefore, community management can work in the right settings, but the fundamental issue is
not of farmer intelligence or awareness, but their incentives. Farmers have few economically
viable alternatives to the current cropping patterns of cash crops, as subsistence and low market
price crops require time and additional sources of income to offset their problems. Farmers
make decisions in a constrained environment of opportunities and threats, highly price
conscious, and with each choice they choose prone to distress and failure due to their lack of
risk bearing capacity, especially in water stressed, semi-arid and hard rock aquifer regions
(Blakeslee et al, 2020).
Next, ways to reduce evapotranspiration and runoff of rainwater can also be beneficial for
tubewells. The Telangana government has already unveiled a scheme called Mission Kakatiya,
which aims to repair and restore 1m hectares of rainwater harvesting and reservoir tanks for
use in conjunction with groundwater by 2020 (Verma and Shah, 2019). Tanks can improve the
storage of rainwater and help raise groundwater tables. In areas like Kacharam where tanks are
not present, building such water storage mechanisms can help alleviate the tubewell failures.
Practices such as furrow irrigation, borewell recharge schemes and encouraging shared
tubewell use for farming families with neighbouring plots of land can all improve conditions
for tubewell irrigation.
The lack of information and awareness of such methods is the problem in villages like
Kacharam, and so the right mix of incentives, public policy initiatives and better practises of
groundwater management can encourage a behaviour shift to a judicious use of the existing
groundwater systems already in place in Kacharam. Finally, at the public policy level, schemes
such as the 24x7 free electricity scheme need to be reversed, which may be politically very
difficult but possible. Some evidence from Rao (2018a) in Telangana suggests that not all
232
farmers think the scheme is beneficial and even necessary, so perhaps through social
movements and farmer led coalitions the political consensus could change to remove the
subsidy and reinvest it in other areas to recharge aquifers.
Finally, for non-farm livelihoods, unfortunately not many recommendations for policy can be
made easily. The structural economic and labour market problems in India will only become
exacerbated in the advent of COVID-19 (Miyamura, 2021). However, the policy suggestions
listed above to improve agricultural and irrigation outcomes can reduce the debt burden for
households in Kacharam and Telangana. In terms of non-farm livelihoods, a greater role for
local district level vocational training, apprenticeships and employment skills training for youth
can be an alternative to traditional education. This can be a mix of partnerships with local firms,
NGOs and government support. Therein, it can prevent educated rural youth from adding to
the growing pool of jobseekers in the labour market and fill demand for other livelihood options
outside the office based private or public sector jobs.
Rural educated youth can also enter farming, but do it in a completely different manner to their
parents. They can take advantage of their digital literacy and learn methods of farming from
Youtube and other online and mobile app-based platforms. These can be used for example to
change cropping patterns to high value agriculture crops such as horticulture or vegetables and
fruits. Government and NGOs can play a role in awareness training and financial start up
support for rural youth to take advantage of technologies and their education to practise farming
in an agroecologically and profitable way. This will also have positive implications for rural
households to change their cropping patterns. Ultimately however, changing the culture of rural
non-farm aspirations is a difficult task, and the demand remains strong for salaried and office-
based positions in the government or private sector. The non-farm economy will require an
overall increase in economic growth and job creation growth by investment and trade policy in
both private and public sector for the current situation in Kacharam to improve.
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8.7 Areas for future research
The thesis has provided insights into the political economy of the Liberalised Green Revolution
in Telangana. Future research, however, can take the work done in this thesis can validate and
explore it in different directions. For example, comparative ethnographic work can investigate
Bt cotton in rainfed and irrigated settings in developing countries, looking in both semi-arid
and hard rock areas as well as more favourable environments. This would provide insights into
the role that irrigation plays in outcomes for Bt cotton across the similar and different
agroecological settings, and whether initiatives such as drip irrigation can improve outcomes.
By exploring Bt cotton in different agroclimatic regions it would also give insights as to the
relative contribution of political economy factors to Bt cotton outcomes, as the different
settings would still be broadly part of the Liberalised Green Revolution and so private sector
firms would still dominate.
In a similar vein, future studies can also look at regions within India and other countries where
farmers have transitioned away from input and capital-intensive cropping patterns like Bt
cotton to more climatically suited and agroecology type cropping patterns. This way, an
ethnographic account can provide details as to the changes the transition has brought to farmers
in the long term in terms of debt, household incomes and food security. It can also show
whether it is economically and practically viable alternative for farmers in marginal settings
versus typical commodity crop cultivation in a time of rising household expenditure and
indebtedness at the household level.
234
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Appendix
Appendix 1 – List of interviewees
No. Interview
Code
Profession Caste Class Gender Date Location
1 A1 Academic N/A N/A M 30/7/18 Hyderabad
2 A2 Academic N/A N/A M 1/8/18 Hyderabad
3 A3 NGO N/A N/A M 30/7/18 Hyderabad
4 A4 Academic N/A N/A F 23/8/18 Hyderabad
5 A5 Academic N/A N/A M 23/8/18 Hyderabad
6 A6 Academic N/A N/A M 23/8/18 Hyderabad
7 A7 Academic N/A N/A M 23/8/18 Hyderabad
8 A8 NGO N/A N/A M 30/7/18 Hyderabad
9 B1 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 29/4/19 Kacharam
10 B2 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 2/5/19 Kacharam
11 B3 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 1/5/19 Kacharam
12 B4 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 2/5/19 Kacharam
13 B5 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 29/4/19 Kacharam
14 B6 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 24/6/19 Kacharam
15 B7 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 2/5/19 Kacharam
16 B8 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 29/4/19 Kacharam
17 B9 Farmer SC Smallholder F 30/4/19 Kacharam
18 B10 Farmer SC Smallholder M 30/4/19 Kacharam
19 B11 Farmer SC Smallholder F 30/4/19 Kacharam
20 B12 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 1/5/19 Kacharam
21 B13 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 17/4/19 Kacharam
22 B14 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 1/5/19 Kacharam
23 B15 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 5/4/19 Kacharam
24 B16 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 19/4/19 Kacharam
25 B17 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 12/4/19 Kacharam
26 B18 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 1/4/19 Kacharam
27 B19 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 2/4/19 Kacharam
28 B20 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 4/4/19 Kacharam
29 B21 Farmer SC Smallholder M 22/4/19 Kacharam
30 C1 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 7/6/19 Kacharam
31 C2 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 12/6/19 Kacharam
32 C3 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 7/6/19 Kacharam
33 C4 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 5/6/19 Kacharam
34 C5 Farmer OBC Medium F 11/6/19 Kacharam
35 C6 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 10/6/19 Kacharam
36 C7 Farmer OBC Medium F 10/6/19 Kacharam
37 C8 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 7/6/19 Kacharam
38 C9 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 13/6/19 Kacharam
39 C10 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 12/6/19 Kacharam
40 C11 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 13/6/19 Kacharam
41 C12 Farmer SC Smallholder M 17/6/19 Kacharam
42 C13 Farmer SC Smallholder M 17/6/19 Kacharam
43 C14 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 6/6/19 Kacharam
270
No. Interview
Code
Profession Caste Class Gender Date Location
44 C15 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 10/6/19 Kacharam
45 C16 Farmer OBC Medium F 14/6/19 Kacharam
46 C17 Farmer ST Smallholder F 4/6/19 Kacharam
47 C18 Farmer SC Smallholder F 20/6/19 Kacharam
48 C19 Farmer SC Smallholder M 20/6/19 Kacharam
49 C20 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 12/6/19 Kacharam
50 C21 Input
Dealer
N/A N/A M 4/6/19 Devarakonda
51 C22 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 18/6/19 Kacharam
52 C23 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 18/6/19 Kacharam
53 C24 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 13/6/19 Kacharam
54 C25 Farmer OBC Medium F 21/6/19 Kacharam
55 C26 Shop
Owner
Muslim N/A M 17/6/19 Kacharam
56 C27 Farmer ST Smallholder M 19/6/19 Kacharam
57 C28 Farmer SC Smallholder M 21/6/19 Kacharam
58 C29 Farmer SC Smallholder F 21/6/19 Kacharam
59 C30 Farmer SC Smallholder F 18/6/19 Kacharam
60 C31 Farmer SC Smallholder M 18/6/19 Kacharam
61 C32 Farmer SC Smallholder F 6/6/19 Kacharam
62 C33 Farmer SC Smallholder M 6/6/19 Kacharam
63 C34 Farmer SC Smallholder M 19/6/19 Kacharam
64 C35 Farmer SC Smallholder M 24/6/19 Kacharam
65 C36 Farmer SC Smallholder M 21/6/19 Kacharam
66 C37 Farmer SC Smallholder F 19/6/19 Kacharam
67 C38 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 17/6/19 Kacharam
68 C39 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 12/6/19 Kacharam
69 C40 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 4/6/19 Kacharam
70 C41 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 24/6/19 Kacharam
71 C42 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 4/6/19 Kacharam
72 C43 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 12/6/19 Kacharam
73 C44 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 5/6/19 Kacharam
74 C45 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 21/6/19 Kacharam
75 C46 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 11/6/19 Kacharam
76 C47 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 7/6/19 Kacharam
77 C48 Farmer OBC Medium F 11/6/19 Kacharam
78 C49 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 13/6/19 Kacharam
79 C50 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 6/6/19 Kacharam
80 C51 Farmer ST Smallholder M 4/6/19 Kacharam
81 C52 Mason Muslim N/A F 24/6/19 Kacharam
82 C53 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 5/6/19 Kacharam
83 C54 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 5/6/19 Kacharam
84 C55 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 24/6/19 Kacharam
85 C56 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 11/6/19 Kacharam
86 C57 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 10/6/19 Kacharam
87 C58 Farmer ST Smallholder F 25/6/19 Kacharam
271
No. Interview
Code
Profession Caste Class Gender Date Location
88 C59 Farmer ST Smallholder M 25/6/19 Kacharam
89 C60 Input
Dealer
N/A N/A M 4/6/19 Devarakonda
90 C61 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 28/6/19 Kacharam
91 D1 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 27/6/19 Kacharam
92 D2 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 28/6/19 Kacharam
93 D3 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 1/7/19 Kacharam
94 D4 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 8/7/19 Kacharam
95 D5 Farmer OBC Medium M 9/7/19 Kacharam
96 D6 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 28/6/19 Kacharam
97 D7 Farmer OBC Medium M 1/7/19 Kacharam
98 D8 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 28/6/19 Kacharam
99 D9 Water
Witcher
OBC Smallholder M 11/7/19 Kacharam
100 D10 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 2/7/19 Kacharam
101 D11 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 2/7/19 Kacharam
102 D12 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 2/7/19 Kacharam
103 D13 Farmer OBC Medium F 9/7/19 Kacharam
104 D14 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 27/6/19 Kacharam
105 D15 Farmer SC Smallholder M 3/7/19 Kacharam
106 D16 Farmer SC Smallholder M 9/7/19 Kacharam
107 D17 Farmer SC Smallholder F 3/7/19 Kacharam
108 D18 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 26/6/19 Kacharam
109 D19 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 27/6/19 Kacharam
110 D20 Farmer OBC Medium F 27/6/19 Kacharam
111 D21 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 27/6/19 Kacharam
112 D22 Farmer SC Smallholder F 10/7/19 Kacharam
113 D23 Farmer SC Smallholder M 4/7/19 Kacharam
114 D24 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 28/6/19 Kacharam
115 D25 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 5/7/19 Kacharam
116 D26 Irrigation
Firm
N/A N/A M 15/7/19 Mallepally
117 D27 Farmer SC Smallholder F 10/7/19 Kacharam
118 D28 Farmer OBC Medium F 26/6/19 Kacharam
119 D29 Shop
Owner
Muslim N/A M 10/7/19 Kacharam
120 D30 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 26/6/19 Kacharam
121 D31 Farmer SC Smallholder M 10/7/19 Kacharam
122 D32 Farmer SC Smallholder F 11/7/19 Kacharam
123 D33 Farmer SC Smallholder M 4/7/19 Kacharam
124 D34 Farmer SC Smallholder M 10/7/19 Kacharam
125 D35 Farmer SC Smallholder F 3/7/19 Kacharam
126 D36 Farmer SC Smallholder M 5/7/19 Kacharam
127 D37 Farmer SC Smallholder F 4/7/19 Kacharam
128 D38 Farmer SC Smallholder M 3/7/19 Kacharam
129 D39 Farmer SC Smallholder F 10/7/19 Kacharam
272
No. Interview
Code
Profession Caste Class Gender Date Location
130 D40 Farmer SC Smallholder F 10/7/19 Kacharam
131 D41 Farmer SC Smallholder F 4/7/19 Kacharam
132 D42 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 1/7/19 Kacharam
133 D43 Irrigation
Firm
N/A N/A M 15/7/19 Mallepally
134 D44 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 9/7/19 Kacharam
135 D45 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 8/7/19 Kacharam
136 D46 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 8/7/19 Kacharam
137 D47 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 8/7/19 Kacharam
138 D48 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 2/7/19 Kacharam
139 D49 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 8/7/19 Kacharam
140 D50 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 4/7/19 Kacharam
141 D51 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 5/7/19 Kacharam
142 D52 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 1/7/19 Kacharam
143 D53 Farmer OBC Medium F 26/6/19 Kacharam
144 D54 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 2/7/19 Kacharam
145 D55 Water
Witcher
OBC Smallholder M 11/7/19 Kacharam
146 D56 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 3/7/19 Kacharam
147 D57 Farmer ST Smallholder M 11/7/19 Kacharam
148 D58 Mason Muslim Smallholder M 5/7/19 Kacharam
149 D59 Irrigation
Firm
N/A N/A M 15/7/19 Mallepally
150 D60 Irrigation
Firm
N/A N/A M 15/7/19 Mallepally
151 D61 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 12/7/19 Kacharam
152 D62 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 12/7/19 Kacharam
153 D63 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 12/7/19 Kacharam
154 D64 Farmer OBC Smallholder M 5/7/19 Kacharam
155 D65 Farmer OBC Smallholder F 9/7/19 Kacharam
156 D66 Farmer ST Smallholder F 25/6/19 Kacharam
157 D67 Farmer ST Smallholder M 11/7/19 Kacharam
158 D68 Farmer ST Smallholder F 25/6/19
158 D69 Irrigation
Firm
N/A N/A M 15/7/19 Mallepally
273
Appendix 2 – Interview coding example
274
Appendix 3 – Interview questions
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
Tubewell companies
Name?
Mee peru?
Age?
Mee Vayasu?
Caste?
Mee Kulamu?
Landholding?
Meeku enni acrealu unnai?
Is this your main occupation?
Idhi mee okate vruti aa leka vere panlu kuda chestara?
What other occupations do you engage in?
Inka emi panlu chestaru?
When was this company set up?
Ee company epudu modalu chesinaru?
When was tubewell irrigation first adopted in Nalgonda/Telangana?
Borelu epudu ochhinai ee prantham lo? Telangana lo?
By whom? Why?
Evaru modalu pettinaru? Enduku?
When was tubewell irrigation first adopted widely?
Etlanti raitulu mundu borlu pettukunnaru?
Why?
Enduku?
Why/how has tubewell irrigation adoption increased in the past few decades in Nalgonda/Telangana?
Etlantivi marpulu occhinai gottapi bavulo pettadam?
How is tubewell irrigation adoption differentiated amongst your customers by:
Caste?
Konni kulamulu ekva pettukuntara thatvi borlu?
Landholding size?
Pedda bhoomi raitulu ekva pettukuntara borlu?
Gender?
Mogadulu adivalu ekwa pettukuntara?
Could you explain how tubewell irrigation works?
Gottapi baavu ela panjestundi? Meeru chappagaltara?
Who is involved in the irrigation installation?
295
Gotappi baavu pettadanki evaru evaru untaru? Emi emi stagelu untai?
What are the different types of tubewell irrigation systems?
Etlantivi gottapi bavulu unntai? Enni feetlu pothai? Current aa diesel aa?
What are the different components needed for tubewell irrigation?
Emi emi parts avusaram gottapi bavvululo
What are the total average costs of installing tubewell irrigation?
Kharchulu entha antha kalpi oka system kosam? Feetlu patti?
Re-drilling?
Oka vela fail ai malli pettalante entha kharchu authundi?
Are sales in tubewell irrigation systems increasing/decreasing over last year? Five years? Ten years?
Mee company lo gottapi bavulu dwara labham ekva ostunadhe poina samvatsaram ninchi? Emi marpulu jarginayi
meeru mundu company pettinapudu nunchi?
What are the main crops used with tubewell irrigation?
Ev evi pantalaki vadutharu gotappi baavu thoti?
296
Drilling rig operators
Name?
Mee peru?
Age?
Mee Vayasu?
Caste?
Mee Kulamu?
Landholding?
Meeku enni acrealu unnai?
Is this your main occupation?
Idhi mee okate vruti aa leka vere panlu kuda chestara?
What other occupations do you engage in?
Inka emi panlu chestaru?
When was this company set up?
Ee company epudu modalu chesinaru?
When was tubewell irrigation first adopted in Nalgonda/Telangana?
Borelu epudu ochhinai ee prantham lo? Telangana lo?
By whom? Why?
Evaru modalu pettinaru? Enduku?
When was tubewell irrigation first adopted widely?
Etlanti raitulu mundu borlu pettukunnaru?
Why?
Enduku?
Why/how has tubewell irrigation adoption increased in the past few decades in Nalgonda/Telangana?
Etlantivi marpulu occhinai gottapi bavulo pettadam?
How is tubewell irrigation adoption differentiated amongst your customers by:
Caste?
Konni kulamulu ekva pettukuntara thatvi borlu?
Landholding size?
Pedda bhoomi raitulu ekva pettukuntara borlu?
Gender?
Mogadulu adivalu ekwa pettukuntara?
Could you explain how tubewell irrigation works?
Gottapi baavu ela panjestundi? Meeru chappagaltara?
Who is involved in the irrigation installation?
Gotappi baavu pettadanki evaru evaru untaru? Emi emi stagelu untai?
297
What are the different types of tubewell irrigation systems?
Etlantivi gottapi bavulu unntai? Enni feetlu pothai? Current aa diesel aa?
What are the different components needed for tubewell irrigation?
Emi emi parts avusaram gottapi bavvululo
What are the total average costs of installing tubewell irrigation?
Kharchulu entha antha kalpi oka system kosam? Feetlu patti?
Re-drilling?
Oka vela fail ai malli pettalante entha kharchu authundi?
Are sales in tubewell irrigation drilling increasing/decreasing over last year? Five years? Ten years?
Mee company lo gottapi bavulu dwara labham ekva ostunadhe poina samvatsaram ninchi? Emi marpulu jarginayi
meeru mundu company pettinapudu nunchi?
What are the main crops used with tubewell irrigation?
Ev evi pantalaki vadutharu gotappi baavu thoti?
How much do you charge for hire of your drilling rig?
Entha kharchu cheyale mee drill ki rent cheyalante?
Per day?
Roju ki?
Per square foot?
Feet vatti?
What is the average depth you drill for farmers?
Averagega enni feetlu drill chestaru raitulaki?
What is the highest depth you have drilled for a farmer?
Annitikante ekva feetlu entha thovvinaru oka raitu ki?
Etlanti raitu unde?
Peru? Bhoomi? Etlanti pantalaki?
How much did this cost?
Entha kharchu aindi?
Where is the highest demand coming from for the business?
Etlanti raitula nunchi ostunadi labham meeku ee business ki?
Why?
Enduku?
Domestic Water Use?
Meeru taguneelaku kuda thovvutara?
298
Appendix 4 – Household survey questions
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
Appendix 5 – Consent form English
Consent form
(Also available in printed or verbal Telugu format)
Research Project Title: Dried Up Livelihoods: The Political Economy of the “Liberalised Green Revolution” in
India
Name of Researcher: Ambarish Karamchedu
Thank you for your interest in taking part in this research.
If you have any questions arising from the information sheet or explanation already given to you, please ask the
researcher before you to decide whether to join in. You will be given a copy of this consent form to keep and refer
to at any time. The original copy will be retained for the research team and will be scanned and shredded, with
the scanned copy being encrypted. Information used is subject to you giving your permission with this consent
form. If you are happy to participate please complete and sign the consent form below.
Please tick:
( ) I confirm that I have read the attached information sheet (Version 2.0, Date 28/11/2018) for the above
study and have had the opportunity to consider the information and ask questions and had these answered
satisfactorily.
( ) I understand that my participation in the study is voluntary and that I am free to withdraw at any time
without giving a reason and without detriment to myself. I understand that it will not be possible to remove my
data from the project once it has been anonymised and forms part of the data set. I agree to take part on this basis
( ) I agree to the interviews being audio / video recorded.
( ) I consent to being audio recorded and notes being written as part of the project (Leave blank if you do
not consent)
( ) I agree that pictures of my face may be used in publications
( ) I agree that any data collected may be published in anonymous form in academic books, reports or
journals
( ) I agree that the researchers/researchers at other institutions may contact me in future about other research
projects.
( ) I understand that the anonymised data can be used by research team members (translators, research
assistants).
( ) I agree that the researchers may retain my contact details in order to provide me with a summary of the
findings for this study.
322
( ) I understand that there may be instances where during the course of the interview information is revealed
which means that the researchers will be obliged to break confidentiality and this has been explained in more
detail in the information sheet.
( ) I agree to take part in this study
Data Protection
The personal information we collect and use to conduct this research will be processed in accordance with
data protection law as explained in the Participant Information Sheet and the Privacy Notice for Research
Participants.
________________________ ________________________
Name of Participant Signature Date
________________________ ________________________
Name of the person taking consent Signature Date
323
Appendix 6 – Consent form Telugu
సమమ త ఫరం
(పరంటడ లద వరబ ల తలుగు ఫరమ టల కూడ లభసతంద)
పరశధన పరజకట శరక: కనసగంపు, మరపు , లద "సంకషభం"? తలంగణల వయ వసయ మరపు యకక రమజకయ
ఆరధక వయ వసథ
పరధశధకుడ పరప: AMBARISH KARAMCHEDU
ఈ పరధశధనల పలగనడనక మ ఆసక తక ధనయ వదలు.
మకు ఇపు టక ఇచచ న సమచరం షట లద వవరణ నండ ఏవన పపశన లు ఉంట, దయచస మరప సన ఇన
చయల లద నర ణయంచ మందు పరధశధకుడన అడగండ. మరప ఎపుు డన ఉంచడనక మరధయు సూచచంచడనక ఈ
సమ త ఫరమ యకక కపన ఇసతరప. ఉపయగంచచన సమచరం ఈ సమ త ఫరమతత మరప మ అనమతన
ఇవవ డనక కటటుబడ ఉంటటంద.
దయచస టక చయండ:
( ) పన పరకక నన పపజక ు కసం సమచర షటన నన చదవన మరధయు అరథం చసకునన నన నన నరమరధంచన
మరధయు పరధశధకుడు న సంతృరతక ఏ పపశన లకు సమధనం ఇసతనన నన నన నరమరధసతనన న.
( ) న పలగనడం సవ చఛ ందమన నన అరథం చసకునన న మరధయు ఏ సమయంల అయన పపజక ు నండ
ఉపసంహరధంచుకవడం నకు ఉచచతం, కరణం లకుండ మరధయు ఏ పరయ వసనలు లకుండన.
( ) నన అందంచ సమచరం కంపయయ టరల మరధయు నటటబ క రధకరడ చయబడందన నన అరథం చసకునన న
( ) ఆడయ రధకరపగ ఉండటనక మరధయు పపజకుుల భగంగ పవసన గమనకలన నన అంగకరధసతనన న (మరప
సమ తంచకపత ఖళగ వదలవయండ)
( ) ఈ పపజక ు చచనన మరధయు సనన కరప రతులకు తలంగణల వయ వసయ మరపు న పరధశలసతంద మరధయు UK
లన మంచసురడ వశవ వదయ లయం నండ అంబరష కరంచూడు యకక PhD పపజక ు కసం పరధశధన పపదశలల
పగమల ఎంరకల చర లన కలగ ఉంటటంద.
( ) డట రధకరప చటుం 1998 లన నబంధనలకు అనగుణంగ ఏ నమతదు చయబడన సమచరం ఖచచ తంగ
రహసయ ంగ నరవ హంచబడుతుందన నన అరథం చసకునన న. ననన గురధతంచ సమచరం బహరంగంగ
అందుబటటలక వసతంద.
( ) న గురధతంపున మరపవషంచడం దవ రమ పవయడం దవ రమ నరమథ రధసతంద అన నన అరథం చసకునన న.
324
( ) అనమక డటన పరధశధన బృందం సభయయ లు (అనవదకులు, పరధశధన సహయకులు) ఉపయగంచవచ న
నన అరథం చసకునన న.
(దయచస ఒక పటటను టకట చయండ :)
( ) న ఇంటరవవ య నండ వలకతసన / వలకతసన పపచురణకు నన అంగకరధసతనన న
( ) న ఇంటరవవ య నండ వలకతసన / వలకతసన పపచురణకు నన ఇషుం లదు
( ) డసరట ుషన రసరడ పపజక ు ల పలగనడనక న అనమతన మంజూరప చసతనన న
భగసవ మ పరప:
సంతకం: తద:
పరధశధకుల పరప:
సంతకం: తద:
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