Discuss the role of Technology in agrarian change in India. (2021)
Technology in agriculture is never neutral: it enters an existing structure of land, caste and credit and is absorbed on that structure’s terms. Indian sociology’s finding is not that technology transformed the village, but that who already owned land determined what technology did.
The sequence of technologies
- Irrigation and the tubewell privatised water, freeing the larger cultivator from the monsoon and from collective control of tanks and canals.
- The Green Revolution package — high-yielding varieties, fertiliser, pesticide and assured irrigation — spread from the mid-1960s, concentrated in Punjab, Haryana and western Uttar Pradesh.
- Mechanisation — tractor, thresher, combine — raised output per worker while displacing labour at harvest; Bt cotton and hybrid seed moved seed reproduction from household to market.
- The current wave is informational: soil health cards, drip irrigation, mobile advisories, e-NAM, drones, digital credit.
Sociological consequences
- Class transformation. The landowner became a capitalist farmer producing for the market with hired labour and reinvested surplus; the attached labourer became a casual wage worker. Jan Breman’s Patronage and Exploitation (1974) recorded the shift from patronage to exploitation.
- The middle-caste rich peasantry — Jats, Patidars, Kammas, Reddys — converted surplus into political power, as Francine Frankel argued. T. K. Oommen held that the Green Revolution cannot benefit the agrarian poor unless the structure itself is altered.
- Widening inequality, regional (irrigated versus rainfed) and intra-village, since the package was scale-biased and credit-dependent; the government’s own inquiry into agrarian tensions conceded a growing gap between affluent farmers and small holders.
- Decline of jajmani: customary grain payments gave way to cash wages, dissolving the hereditary service tie William Wiser described.
- Feminisation of work. As men exit to non-farm jobs and machines displace male tasks first, women remain: PLFS for 2021–22 shows 63 per cent of women workers in agriculture against 38 per cent of men, on lower wages, without land title or credit.
- New dependencies on seed, fertiliser and credit markets turn a bad season into debt, and debt into distress.
Ecology and distress
Assured irrigation in the wheat–paddy belt has become unsustainable. Under the Dynamic Ground Water Resource Assessment (2024), Punjab’s stage of groundwater extraction exceeded 150 per cent, with about 110 of its 153 blocks over-exploited, against a national average near 60 per cent. With soil degradation and stubble burning, the technology that produced prosperity now produces distress in the same districts.
Theoretical readings
William Ogburn’s technological determinism, with its notion of cultural lag, treats technology as prime mover and institutions as laggards — the naive position. Karl Marx’s distinction between forces and relations of production is more useful: new forces are adopted only where relations permit, then reshape them. The modes of production debate turned on this — Ashok Rudra found capitalist criteria unmet even in Punjab, Utsa Patnaik judged development capitalist by the test of production relations, and Amit Bhaduri’s semi-feudalism explained why a landlord-cum-moneylender resists innovation.
Conclusion
Technology raised output and ended import dependence, but did not by itself change the agrarian structure; mediated by prior ownership, it deepened the inequalities it met. The Green Revolution was a success in production and a failure in distribution — and the digital wave will repeat that pattern unless land and credit are addressed first.