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Paper short abstract

Caste structures the labor that sustains agribusiness in rural India. Through ethnographic research in Bihar, this paper shows how marketing agents act as infrastructural intermediaries whose caste-based legitimacy enables corporate expansion and reproduces unequal informal labor.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines caste as a form of social infrastructure that shapes how agribusiness penetrates rural India and restructures informal labor. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork (2024–25) in Nawada district, Bihar, the study follows agrichemical marketing agents employed by multinational corporations as they move across villages conducting demonstrations, advising farmers, and circulating products. Far from being neutral intermediaries, these agents rely on caste-coded legitimacy, kinship familiarity, bodily comportment, and idioms of trust to enroll farmers in corporate supply chains. Their labor — material, affective, and relational — reveals how development infrastructures are sustained not only by physical systems but by embodied social hierarchies.

The concept of caste-graded informality is proposed to describe how informal agribusiness work is stratified along caste and class lines. Upper and dominant caste youth enter marketing roles through informal referral networks and enjoy greater acceptance in villages, while lower-caste youth remain structurally excluded from these opportunities despite sharing similar aspirations. This stratification shapes exposure to risk, debt, and precarity, revealing that informality is not flat but segmented.

By framing caste as infrastructure, the paper speaks to global debates on how materiality, labor, and power shape development, offering comparative insights for scholars of agrarian capitalism, informality, and labor intermediation in the Global South and beyond. It argues that any account of rural development — or the infrastructures that sustain it — must treat caste not as cultural residue but as a structural condition enabling and constraining capitalist expansion.