TY  - BOOK
AU  - Kumar, Richa
TI  - Rethinking revolutions: soyabean, choupals, and the changing countryside in central India 
SN  - 9780199465330
U1  - 338.109543 KUM-R 
PY  - 2016///
CY  - India
PB  - Oxford University Press
KW  - India--Malwa (Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan)
KW  - Agriculture--Economic aspects
KW  - Agriculture--Social aspects
KW  - Agriculture and state
KW  - Agriculture -- Economic aspects -- India -- Malwa (Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan)
KW  - Agriculture -- Social aspects -- India -- Malwa (Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan)
KW  - Agriculture and state -- India -- Malwa (Madhya Pradesh and Rajasthan)
N1  - An ethnographic study of the processes of agrarian change in the Malwa region of central India, over the last 40 years. It argues that both techno-managerial ways of understanding and evaluating agriculture, as well as those which emphasise the lenses of caste, class and gender, are inadequate in capturing the diverse processes at work in shaping the lives of rural people.
The last forty years have witnessed massive agrarian change in the Malwa region of central India—beginning with the introduction of soyabean cultivation in the 1970s, known as the ‘yellow revolution’, and new information technology–based markets in the 2000s, referred to as choupals. This ethnographic study is aimed at revisiting these changes which were proclaimed as technology-mediated development. 

Examining the claims of prosperity and empowerment of farmers, Rethinking Revolutions challenges the notion that science and technology by themselves can bring unparalleled economic growth and prosperity to rural India. It argues that both techno-managerial ways of understanding and evaluating agriculture, as also those which emphasize the lenses of caste, class, and gender, are inadequate in capturing the diverse processes at work in shaping the lives of rural people. 

Highlighting the role of the environment and technology—not in deterministic ways, but as non-human forces working upon and with human agents—it suggests that both the social and the technical must be considered together to understand the specific trajectories of agrarian change. Drawing upon science and technology studies, together with critical scholarship on the political economy of development and agrarian change, this book shows how people and their environs have reconfigured each other in producing the world they inhabit, thus contributing towards new theoretical framings of agriculture and rural transformation
ER  -