Abstract
The central question driving this dissertation is whether digital technologies truly enhance efficiency, inclusion, and innovation within Indian agricultural value chains in India. Governments and private sector firms increasingly view digital agriculture as pivotal for transforming rural economies. Technologies like real-time soil sensors, automated tractors, and digital market platforms are touted to alleviate traditional agricultural constraints and integrate smallholder farmers more effectively into markets. India's context is crucial, given its significant rural population and rapid digital infrastructure expansion under the Modi administration's Digital India initiative. This dissertation focuses on the period from 2014 to 2023, a time of substantial internet penetration growth and government-led digital agriculture initiatives. It aims to evaluate these initiatives across four critical stages of agricultural value chains: pre-production, production, post-production, and retail. The potential for efficiency, inclusion and innovation is studied across four stages in the value chain.In the pre-production stage, digital tools promise improved access to agronomic inputs and extension services. Historically, the Indian government has subsidized inputs like seeds and pesticides, while state-led extension services have trained farmers. Recent reforms have shifted these services to a demand-driven model, influenced by the "bottom of pyramid" (BOP) business approach, which focuses on leveraging the purchasing power of low-income individuals. Initially tested through physical telecentres like ITC’s e-Choupal, this model has evolved with digital platforms replacing traditional intermediaries. These platforms, often supported by global agribusiness firms and public-private partnerships with the Modi administration, enable data gathering and processing on farming practices. However, this digital extension system can exacerbate inequalities, as uneven digital literacy and connectivity leave smaller farmers at a disadvantage. Consequently, rather than enhancing efficiency and access to agronomic information, these privatized digital platforms may widen the gap between smallholders and larger, commercially viable farmers.
The second stage concerns digital land tenure systems, aiming to enhance transparency and secure property rights. Demographic pressures and environmental limits have reduced average land sizes, while urban and industrial growth have intensified land conflicts. To address these issues, mainstream development organizations like the World Bank have advocated for formal, individual property rights over land, believing this would allocate land more efficiently through market mechanisms. Digital technologies for land surveying and registration, such as computers and drones, have been implemented to facilitate this process. Initiatives like Bhoomi in Karnataka and Dharani in Telangana have aimed to increase efficiency and reduce corruption in land administration. However, these digital systems tend to favour formal, individualistic property rights, often leading to the dispossession and displacement of marginalized groups such as scheduled castes and tribes. The reliability of these systems is contingent on the accuracy of the data they use, which can perpetuate rather than resolve issues of misallocation and corruption. Despite these limitations, the federal government has accelerated digital land surveying, including drone-dependent programs that often exclude poorer farmers and groups like women landowners. Without effective redress mechanisms, the digitisation of land tenure can enable wealthier groups to identify, access, and accumulate valuable land, further disadvantaging vulnerable populations and smallholders.
Moving to post-production, digital technologies aim to streamline processes like post-harvest handling and marketing. Traditional development approaches focused on state-led market-building to attract private sector investments. Recently, however, the mainstream development community has shifted this sequence, prioritising making projects investable for financial actors who then fund and manage developmental infrastructures. Digital financial inclusion is crucial to this agenda, particularly for rural markets that lack visibility and are deemed risky for business. State policies and venture capitalists aim to integrate post-harvest exchanges into digital networks to foster trust among farmers and commodity traders. Arya.ag exemplifies an attempt to bundle services with digital financial inclusion, functioning as a crop warehouse, farmer credit and insurance provider, commodity trader, and development agent. By acting as both a credit originator for farmers and an intermediary between producers and traders, Arya.ag aims to build new markets on behalf of commodity traders. The firm has acquired data platforms to develop a national credit rating system, providing detailed information on farmers and farmland. Under the guise of digital financial inclusion, Arya.ag segments its offerings to target profitable opportunities, attracting investors to emerging rural markets. While Indian officials and impact founders rely on Arya.ag to deliver market infrastructures to underserved actors, financial incentives are more likely to benefit well-positioned farmers within established commercial networks.
Lastly, in the retail stage, digital platforms seek to integrate farmers into supply chains without the need for extensive physical infrastructures like supermarkets. In theory, integrating suppliers through arrangements like contract farming would incentivise procurers to invest in enhancing producers' efficiency and quality, known as "value chain upgrading." However, opposition from farmers and small traders has led officials to restrict foreign direct investment (FDI) and contract farming by supermarket chains such as Walmart and Carrefour. The 2020 Farm Bills, which sought to liberalize agricultural markets and allow direct procurement by supermarkets, sparked one of the largest farmer protests in Indian history, leading to the Bills' withdrawal. These restrictions on physical supermarket growth have indirectly promoted digital e-commerce, a subsector not subject to such limitations. This shift has enabled the rise of protected retail conglomerates like Reliance, leading to competition between foreign and local operators to become key middlemen in the supply chain. Companies like Reliance are digitizing existing kiranas, while others like Ninjacart capture B2B supply networks, creating distributed digital networks that avoid the top-down, integrated model of supermarkets. These digital networks achieve de facto liberalisation of the agri-food supply chain without the political backlash seen with formal attempts.
Overall, these stages offer critical insights into the impact of digital technologies on farmers and the Indian agri-food system, allowing an assessment over the claims of enhanced efficiency, inclusion and innovation. First, the digital revolution in Indian agriculture prioritises market efficiency over agronomic practices. Unlike the Green Revolution, which focused on enhancing crop yields through scientific advancements, the digital transformation emphasises reducing transaction costs and spreading supply and demand signals to address the agricultural crisis. This shift views farmers not as land stewards but as business actors, even encouraging those with minimal incomes to participate as consumers under Bottom of Pyramid (BOP) business models. Small traders or kiranas are now potential warehouses, distributors, and franchisees for large conglomerates like Reliance. This method transfers developmental responsibilities to individuals, reimagining farmers as informed consumers expected to embrace risks and pursue profit maximization. The digital revolution thus replaces the efficiency focus of the Green Revolution with a suite of cross-chain apps and devices designed to monitor, link, and extract commissions as exchange mediators.
Second, in terms of inclusion, the hypothetical universalism of digital technologies is widely undercut by the commercial emphasis of solutions on the ground. As a result of this contradiction, the dominating approaches to digital agriculture appear unlikely to include all agrarian livelihoods in India. Rather than market inclusion in competitive terms, digital networks offer adverse inclusion for most, reinforcing the prerogatives of agribusiness as new mediators in rural areas. Whether farmers are buyers or sellers, and regardless of persistent oligopolistic and monopsonistic relationships, mainstream development models are agnostic to power relations, and they focus on the idea of transaction costs. That is, if farmers could enter formalised market relationships, as in the case of land markets, the entire chain would reap the benefits of supply and demand alignment. Digital agriculture's commercial nature often overlooks the realities of rural inequality, leading to fragmented access and benefits. Thus, the ideal of inclusive, data-driven supply chains is undermined by the digital divide and market concentration, resulting in unequal benefits and power imbalances. As digital platforms promise market inclusion, they often create competitive advantages for large firms, potentially increasing disparities in the agri-food sector.
Finally, innovation or the way digital agriculture technologies are developed is also impacted by the actors and incentives that predominate in contemporary Indian development approaches. In the context of India’s agricultural technology sector, a market-driven innovation paradigm has led to a focus on profitability, with venture capitalists prioritising investments with high returns, often at the expense of practical solutions for farmers. This has resulted in a proliferation of digital marketplaces aimed at bypassing traditional intermediaries. However, these platforms tend to offer similar transactional features rather than a diverse range of agricultural services. The urban bias in investment trends overlooks the specific needs of the rural farming community, and business models based on asset ownership often exclude smallholders who cannot effectively leverage digital innovations. The emphasis on quick growth and high engagement has favoured apps that are profitable over those that might be crucial for agricultural development, leading to a profusion of competing sites with nearly identical offerings. This also emerges from a delegated, privatised model of innovation, where venture capitalists and large corporations supported by the government play a growing role in determining the direction of technological progress. Consequently, digital marketplaces have become the predominant investment in digital agriculture technologies, overshadowing other offerings and reinforcing a disconnect between digital projects and rural needs.
Thus, this thesis concludes that digital technologies are not necessarily aligned with further efficiency, inclusion or innovation in agriculture. As commercial platforms increasingly mediate extension and training, land becomes a digitized asset, post-harvest activities intertwine with global financial networks, and retail conglomerates manage supply chains. Contrary to the win-win promise of digital solutions, the digital revolution in Indian agriculture does not necessarily bring efficiency, inclusion, and innovation for all actors. Instead, the impacts of technological innovation depend on the influence of certain constituencies: channelling investments toward specific solutions and influencing development strategies pursued by state and central government officials. This research addresses several gaps in understanding the digital revolution in Indian agriculture. It offers a comprehensive examination of the entire agri-food chain, reflecting on the lessons of the Green Revolution to provide insights into the actual changes experienced by farmers. The study contributes to policy debates by uncovering conflicting understandings of the digital revolution among stakeholders and examining the political dimensions of digital agriculture. It highlights how digitalization aligns with broader political and economic goals, emphasizing the role of private sector-enabling state reforms in shaping digital agriculture. This thesis concurs with the growing scholarship suggesting that global development is increasingly mediated by the institutional and ideological power of leading corporations.
| Date of Award | 1 Aug 2024 |
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| Original language | English |
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| Supervisor | Nick Srnicek (Supervisor) & Paolo Gerbaudo (Supervisor) |