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Paper short abstract

Agricultural drones in India reshape caste and gendered labour, marginalise farmers’ knowledge, and advance state and corporate-led agrarian modernisation, operating with partial understanding of agrarian realities and producing sociotechnical inequalities.

Paper long abstract

This paper explores discussions around agricultural drone technology that have emerged in India, examining claims about its potential and how the country’s agrarian future is constructed in state policy decisions. It also investigates the intersection of drone technology, embodied labour, and farmers’ knowledge, and how these are mediated, reconfigured, and transformed. The objective is to analyse how technology interacts with and reshapes the material, physical, and embodied dimensions of gendered and caste-marked labour that produces forms of sociotechnical injustice. The study contributes to discussions on technology, caste, and the labouring body, theorising the complex dynamics of displacement, devaluation, and transformation in agrarian India. It focuses on the economic logic of agriculture centred on efficiency, productivity, and profitability, and how this intersects with the social and political logic of farming, skills, and situated knowledge, especially when tools and equipment become sites of social control.

By drawing on Science and Technology Studies (STS), this ethnographic enquiry examines how drone technology disrupts culturally embedded labour and knowledge. It analyses how Drone Didis, farmers, and agricultural labourers co-produce meaning with drones. It argues that drones enable data-driven precision to operate with partial understandings of complex agrarian realities, reinforcing expert–user divides. It further interprets drones as inherently political artefacts that embed inequality by determining access, control, and exclusion (Akrich 1992; Pacey 1983; Winner 1990) In this way, the state’s centralised agricultural modernisation agenda advances expert-led, technocratic control by shifting authority away from embodied, experiential understandings of farming. Keywords- Labour, knowledge, agriculture, socio-technical injustice, Agricultural drones