Memories, new research and contradiction in Indian agriculture
Change in the city, frozen memories, and the role of women in agriculture.
Memories of city and startup surfaced
The Hyderabad I left and the one I came back after 2 years are not the same. It could be because of the new real-estate being built at brisk speed. It all could be due to the new flyovers built which outnumber the total flyovers when I left Hyderabad.
Personally, it is no longer the city which holds my future. It has now become my hometown which I visit for long durations of time. I vote for state elections in this city.
Time doesn’t wait for anyone. Growing cities make it evident with numerous construction sites. On the other hand, memories are often frozen in time. And, my memory of Hyderabad was frozen in the past. My recent visits for revealing in the gap that exists.
When I travel in the new to me Hyderabad, I don’t recollect roads or colonies by their names or landmark. I remember them by memories of conversation with various buyers of Subjimandi.app.
Like my memories frozen in time, their shop/stall remains the same. The buyers remain the same. They have gone back to buying from Mandi. The essential nature of produce markets makes companies like us inessential. The flow of produce through Mandi(s) system is similar to a perennial river.
The chutzpah to believe we could divert the stream by building an alternate marketplace through a new course is commendable. I was not the first to think of it. I won’t be the last as well.
Produce markets have also been frozen in time. They don’t change or unwilling to change because for every stakeholder involved in this supply chain. The existing marketplace is the rational choice(emphasis mine).
In such contexts, as we have learned from field research across diverse states, districts and agricultural commodity networks, the presence of ‘many intermediaries at multiple levels is less a sign of market inefficiency and more a rational response’ to particular regional structures and conditions, in which such actors play vital roles in local and long-distance market networks.
Our previous buyers went back to Mandi(s) because it provided them a single location to buy all their produce with credit being offered by traders. We were the alternate, that offered them the same produce but available in a new way, grade wise. They procured from us while they buy at the Mandi(s). A similar thing happened with the farmers we sourced from as well. They started selling to local agents or at nearest Mandi(s)
The default, which are the Mandi(s) will be improbable to supplant at scale with the many challenges you face with produce markets. All of which are by design and out of your control. Non taxable part being the biggest of all.
The way to approach this market is to see it as access markets. You are building a service to provide access to farmers to sell produce and on the flip side helping buyers access harvested produce instead of traded produce available at their nearest Mandi.
Unlike my memory of Hyderabad which is no more the reality. My memory of building marketplaces in produce markets is still the reality and will continue to remain so for near future. Hence, why I keep harping about it so many times and in so many ways.
Fresh research on the role of women and digital communication in agriculture
While in the previous section, I paint a disheartening picture. The fact I still keep writing about agriculture is my way of being optimistic on the longer horizon.
Agriculture is changing because villages are changing. The many women studying agriculture are dissecting the domain from different points of view.
As an operator, these studies when interspersed with the my own experience provide me a toolset to solve problems.
Sruthi Rajagopalan runs Ideas with India, a podcast talking about academic ideas about India. She every year talks to scholars who are in the job market(looking for academic gigs). They come on and talk about their research. I come across some phenomenal papers through this medium.
Rithika Kumar on the Impact of Male Migration on Women’s Political Engagement
The core discovery of Rithika’a paper is that women tend to start participating in claim making when the men in their household migrate.
You find that male outmigration actually leads to an increase in female claim-making, because now the women who are left behind actually need to make demands from state actors and institutions. They need to actually get the claims that they're entitled to through welfare services and so on. The effect you find is kind of big, and it truly surprised me. You find that women with migrant husbands are 17 percent more likely to make these claims relative to those with co-resident husbands.
This study is also fascinating because of its location. Bihar, the state known for its backward economic status. Even over there, women are taking a centre stage. Why not propel the same trend to agriculture as well. I am hoping that an entrepreneur is willing to take that uncertainty and build their next big venture.
An another interesting thread connecting this is that the male migrant labourers in Hyderabad consist of Biharis as well. Construction segment is one of the largest employers of labour in India. Without male migration, women’s contributions might have been masked for many more years.
Everything is connected to agriculture due to the sheer amount of people and land under its purview.
Vanisha Sharma on the Effects of Internet Expansion in Developing Communities
This is interesting because of the digital community narrative that caught fire and quickly evaporated as well.
Vanisha does an RCT (Randomised Control Trial) study of community creation of WhatsApp. The relevance of it to Farm Pragathi I wrote last week couldn’t be more potent.
…For example, there are now these smartphone applications that use deep learning neural networks to diagnose pests just by seeing a picture of a leaf and they recommend pesticides. But in my pilot work, I found that most of the usage of these apps was close to cities or in suburban areas, so I wanted to test whether we can bridge this gap between rural and urban and make use of this and see if it can benefit rural, remote farmers as well.
This motivated my paper. The problem is that social media networks are formed endogenously, which means that people self-select into their social media groups which creates echo chambers and it’s hard to tease out effects of these groups. To address this, I conducted this multivillage randomized control trial in which I exogenously assigned farmers to WhatsApp groups. And we made sure that these farmers did not know each other in person by making sure that these villages were not adjacent to each other because oftentimes, if they’re neighboring, then farmers know each other.
Broadly, I test the intent-to-treat effects on farm expenses and revenues, and the mechanisms that I test are farmer information-sharing behavior and their beliefs about unknown farmers and agricultural information sharing with them.
First and foremost, communities work initially but they need continuous work. Most teams falter over here. Retention is the key.
Both the papers give me and anyone who is in this field 100s of ideas to explore a women centric digital first community of farmers.
Recommendation
Indian Agriculture and its contradiction
Mekhala Krishnamurthy’s work is a must if you want to understand the markets in Indian agriculture. She is one of the few who actually tries to understand why we are where we are,
The problem is that there is little interest or effort in understanding the genesis of agrarian arrangements and entanglements, investigating their moral and political foundations, and analysing the reasons for their persistence or transformation in different contexts. Instead, the approach to agriculture is at once heavy-handed and deeply indifferent to actually existing conditions. This is exemplified by a battery of laws, policies, and schemes that by design end up simultaneously over-determining and undermining the vast and varied field of social, economic, and political life known as agriculture and those who depend upon it most deeply
I used a convenient quote in the first section but the entire article is really good. Give it a read to size the complexity in Indian Agriculture.
Shifting stakeholders
Women and their participation requires more deliberation in agriculture. The recent slew of papers are a good start to get acquainted about the underlying shift taking place.
The first time I was exposed to women in agriculture was when our team at Subjimandi.app had to struggle harder in convincing the woman farmer for grade wise procurement than the male. It opened to a hidden world that I couldn’t stop looking ever since.
Singing off till next time,
Vivek, shuttling between cities and writing newsletter on flights!