Democracy’s Second Nature: India’s Green Revolution from the Underground Up

• In Event: Science, the State, and Second Nature

English Abstract

Often called the greatest international development success story of the twentieth century, the Green Revolution also ranks among the most significant ecological transformations wrought by humankind. Historians of science have begun to rethink this purportedly US-driven agrarian change as it spread across the world, instead emphasizing the importance of local scientific initiative and “South-South” collaboration. Most of this historiography has centered on seed technologies. This paper focuses on a different but equally crucial aspect of India’s Green Revolution: groundwater mining for irrigation, and with it the technology of the electric pumpset. This lens both extends the timespan of the Green Revolution back well before the 1960s, and brings an expanded set of actors into the frame. In the dry districts of Madras Presidency (today’s Tamil Nadu), even before independence the national leader in rural electrification, state-sponsored technological change refashioned rural ecologies. In so doing, though, it generated political currents that undercut the developmentalist push for industrialization. In an inversion of the industry-first electricity systems of the affluent world, farmers exerted their political muscle to secure cheap power, thereby eroding the control of state technocrats over the energy sector. In turn, subsidized electricity would create a growing ecological crisis through aquifer depletion. In this way, the Green Revolution unintentionally provided the pivot around which the shift from colonial extractivism to democratic extractivism turned in India. This case unsettles the neat equation of technical expertise and infrastructural expansion with state formation, and instead spotlights bottom-up drivers of envirotechnical change.

Author

• Elizabeth Chatterjee, University of Chicago