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Paper short abstract

Digital agriculture is promoted as inclusive, yet evidence from Uttarakhand shows that platform-based reforms privilege well-connected markets while marginalising hill-region smallholders. Rather than redistributing power, digital platforms risk reproducing spatial and institutional inequalities.

Paper long abstract

Digital agriculture is increasingly promoted as a transformative pathway for inclusive rural development, promising improved price discovery, market integration, and smallholder empowerment. In India, digital market platforms such as the National Agriculture Market (eNAM) have been positioned as flagship interventions to modernize agricultural marketing and enhance farmer incomes. However, emerging evidence suggests that these digital reforms may be reconfiguring — rather than dismantling — entrenched hierarchies of scale, geography, and institutional power. Drawing on primary price data from regulated markets in Uttarakhand and interviews with market intermediaries, traders, and farmers, this paper examines how platform-mediated agricultural reforms produce uneven development outcomes across spatially and infrastructurally differentiated regions. Using time-series market integration analysis and qualitative evidence, the study shows that digitally connected plain-region mandis experience improved price discovery and integration, while hill-region markets — characterized by weaker infrastructure, fragmented supply chains, and limited digital capacity — remain poorly integrated and structurally disadvantaged. Rather than enabling smallholder inclusion, digital platforms increasingly privilege high-volume traders and better-connected markets, reinforcing scale advantages and shifting bargaining power away from peripheral producers. The platformization of agricultural markets thus generates new forms of data visibility and algorithmic governance that selectively amplify some actors while rendering others digitally invisible. The paper situates these findings within broader debates on digital agriculture and development, arguing that current ICT4Ag models risk reproducing existing inequalities under the guise of technological inclusion. It concludes by exploring the conditions under which alternative, community-anchored digital and energy infrastructures could enable more just agrarian futures.