Notes from the Field: Who Really Gains When We 'Fix' Agriculture?

Between incubation programs and terrace trays, some questions refuse to go away.

I don’t yet know how all the pieces below fit together. What I do know is that I come to agriculture with corporate and urban privileges that most farmers do not have. So this is not a grand theory of Indian agriculture—just me trying to make sense of what happens when startup playbooks, public policy classes and legacy ideas of village self‑reliance collide with real fields and real livelihoods.

Over the last few months, my schedule has looked more like a student’s than a mid‑career professional’s. There was a UAS incubation program in early March, a 10‑day Navarambha pre‑incubation course at the Agri Innovation Centre in GKVK, and my public policy classes at Takshashila moving toward term‑end. Navarambha is probably the best a government‑backed program can offer right now: structured sessions on markets, business models, value chains and pitching, delivered by people who care about agri‑startups.

But walking out of those classrooms and back into real fields—literal and metaphorical—I’m left with two worries. First, that the incentive to continue farming is eroding in a country that has broadly achieved food security and grown comfortable importing what we want beyond necessity. A fellow participant put it bluntly over coffee: the sale value of agricultural land often exceeds any realistic income from cultivating it over many years. That sentence has stayed with me.

The second worry is about how we talk solutions. In most startup and incubation spaces, the air is full of “market linkages”, “tech enablement” and “scale”. Some of this is clearly useful. But the underlying logic often drifts toward “big is good”: big FPOs, large polyhouses, large platforms. If hydroponics or protected cultivation only seem to “make sense” at a certain industrial scale, what story are we telling smaller, mixed farms that don’t fit that frame.

Half a world away, economist E.F. Schumacher argued that modern economies over‑value what is big, centralized and capital‑heavy, and under‑value what is small, local and people‑centered. In Small Is Beautiful, he wrote in favour of village‑scale, ecologically grounded production systems—arguments that sound close to India’s own debates on rural livelihoods and local food systems. Much earlier, Gandhi’s idea of Gram Swaraj imagined each village as a “complete republic”: largely self‑sufficient for basic needs and relating to the outside world from a place of dignity rather than dependence.

The complication is that we are trying to revive some of these instincts in a fully networked world. The village square is now also the WhatsApp group. Market discovery happens as much on apps as at the mandi. That raises new questions I don’t yet have answers to: if community linkages run on digital rails, who owns and sees the data about what a village grows, consumes and demands.

I come to agriculture with privileges most farmers do not have. So I’m careful not to treat my terrace or my coursework as a grand “experiment with truth”, just as a small attempt to see whether the languages of startups, public policy and self‑reliant communities can do more good than harm when they meet real farmers’ lives.

If you are working on or living inside an example where “small and local” and “tech and markets” are pulling in the same direction for farmers. I’d love to hear about it in the comments - or tell me I’m wrong.