Overview
Small-Scale Farming in Indian Agriculture
This project was completed in 2017 with the publication of How Do Small Farmers Fare? Evidence from Village Studies in India.
This research examined the socio-economic characteristics of small-scale farming households in different agro-ecological regions of India and the viability of small-scale farming in contemporary conditions. This was a theoretical and empirical study, and draws on a wide range of sources of secondary data and on data from the Foundation’s archive of household data from villages in different parts of India.
A conference was organised to discuss the findings of research before publication of the book.
This project was supported by Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung.
Agricultural productivity and production in India grew steadily in the post-green revolution period. Public institutions of agricultural research and education, and the community of agricultural scientists, were at the forefront of the transformation of Indian agriculture. This facet of agricultural development is somewhat recognised in scholarship. However, there has been limited work on the evolution of agricultural science and its adoption in actual production in independent India from the perspective of the history of knowledge. The history of the science and the practice of agricultural production has not been adequately studied in the context of the global flow of knowledge and the contemporary economic and political history. It is this gap in scholarship that the oral histories project aims to fill.
As part of the project, the Foundation, in collaboration with the Bangalore International Centre (BIC) and the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS), organised an event titled “Voices from the Lab and the Field: Oral Histories of Agrarian Change” on September 24, 2025, at BIC, Bengaluru. The event explored the agricultural transformations of the 1960s, drawing on oral histories from agricultural science and agrarian movements in India. This discussion is part of the 69th edition of the Archives Public Lecture Series, which features explorations in and around the NCBS archives. The speakers for the event were Parvathi Menon, Former Resident Editor of The Hindu, Bengaluru, and Sandipan Baksi, Director at the Foundation for Agrarian Studies.
Know more about the event here.
