Paper short abstract:

This paper considers onion cultivation and trade as an infrastructural assemblage against the backdrop of agrarian crisis in rural India. In particular, it addresses the question of ir/responsibility in the near complete privatization of agricultural production from seed to storage.

Paper long abstract:

This paper considers onion cultivation and trade as an infrastructural assemblage against the backdrop of agrarian crisis in rural India. I analyze the infrastructure of cultivation from seed to warehouses, from tube-wells to price subsidies - the networks of people, plants and technologies that feed the nation. In particular, it addresses the question of ir/responsibility in the near complete privatization of agricultural production from seed to storage. Although the Indian state now encourages farmers to engage in high-value horticulture through the National Horticulture Mission, farmers rely almost entirely on caste networks and private capital to enable successful cultivation and sale of onions. These social, ecological and technological networks are crucial to agrarian development. However, the unevenness of infrastructural access further exacerbates inequalities of caste and class in the countryside and further deplete the region's aquifers. And yet, more and more farmers turn to onion cultivation in the hope of spectacular profits from its high yields and high prices - buying new varieties of seed, building storehouses, renting trucks to take produce to the market. The onion encapsulates rural aspirations for progress and prosperity , symbolizing hope for a better future. This paper therefore examines this agrarian assemblage as an infrastructure of hope that symbolizes the precarity and possibility of commercial cultivation in the context of state abandonment.