Presentation short abstract

Agricultural change in India remains shaped by Green Revolution interventions. Assam’s contrasting trajectory reveals the limits of standardized policy. This study examines how farmers navigate transformation and why reflexive, context-sensitive approach to policies are crucial.

Presentation long abstract

Understanding agricultural transformation in India requires revisiting the legacy of the Green Revolution, a defining moment that reshaped global food systems. While the Green Revolution supposedly led to higher yields, it also produced unintended social and ecological consequences—deepening inequalities, increasing marginalization and transforming food systems in ways that continue to reverberate through farmer distress, protests, and rising precarity. However, Assam presents a distinctive case within this national story. Unlike early Green Revolution states, Assam remains rich in biodiversity, with a long tradition of cultivating diverse rice landraces, limited mechanization, and agricultural practices embedded in unique cultural and ecological contexts.

Assam’s agrarian landscape has also been shaped by colonial histories, political unrest, identity movements, and plantation economies, creating layers of vulnerability alongside recurring floods, biodiversity loss, and human–animal conflicts. At the same time, new input-intensive technologies are increasingly shaping agricultural choices, raising questions about how global models of modernization intersect with local realities.

This study proposes to examine Assam as a critical site for rethinking agricultural transformation in India. Its trajectory diverges significantly from states that experienced the first wave of Green Revolution interventions, offering an opportunity to explore how and why these differences persist. The study argues that despite decades of evidence of uneven outcomes from standardized agricultural models, policy approaches remain top-down and insufficiently reflexive. The paper will foreground three core concerns: how farmers negotiate change, whose knowledge is valued, and what more context-sensitive and inclusive agricultural planning might look like for the future.