







































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 5 (2): 145-148, July 2022 

BOOK REVIEW  

Deconstructing Agricultural Revolutions 

Muthuvel Deivendran* 

Richa Kumar, Rethinking Revolutions: Soyabean, Choupals, and the Changing 
Countryside in Central India, New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2016. 

In conventional policy 
narratives, it is believed that 
agricultural productivity can 
be boosted through a mix of 
technology, irrigation, and de-
regulated markets. Richa 
Kumar, in Rethinking 
Revolution, however, argues 
otherwise. Through a detailed 
study of two types of 
revolutions that were 
introduced in the Malwa 
region (Madhya Pradesh, 
India), Kumar offers a 
compelling counter-narrative, 
which effectively argues that 
radical agricultural 
transformations are shaped 
by a range of factors, chance 
events, and many an 
unintended consequence 
rather than through the top-
down linear implementation 

 
* Researcher, French Institute of Pondicherry, muthuvel.deivendran@gmail.com. 

Copyright © Deivendran 2022. Released under Creative Commons Attribution © 
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of  Economic 

Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581–6152 (print); 2581–6101 (web).  

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v5i2.772  

mailto:muthuvel.deivendran@gmail.com
https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v5i2.772


 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [146] 

of a planned techno-managerial intervention.  

The two revolutions that Kumar focuses on are the Yellow Revolution (the 
cultivation of soyabean, Glycine max) and the adoption of the digital 
eChoupal model (the information revolution), which was initiated by ITC-
IBD, which is currently one of the largest multinational companies in India 
engaged in agri-business. While the spurt in the cultivation of soyabean in 
the Malwa region began in right earnest in the 1970s, eChoupal—as a digital 
infrastructure for connectivity—was ambitiously initiated several decades 
later in 2000. Methodologically, Rethinking Revolutions is heavily tilted 
towards the use of ethnography for describing and analysing how diverse 
actors—farmers, corporate interests, agri-researchers, and traders—have 
influenced and consequently been shaped by the processes of rapid agrarian 
transformation.   

In chapters two to six, Kumar unpacks and reconsiders the varying 
elements that led up to the Yellow Revolution—notably, labour relations, 
environmental costs, caste, gender, and the nitty-gritty details involved in 
enabling agricultural production in such a dry and semi-arid environment. 
The first attempts to cultivate soyabean as a food crop in the Malwa region 
can be traced back to the 1960s. The effort, however, gained traction only 
in the 1970s. In part, as Kumar explains, the yellow variety that was initially 
introduced through the collaborative efforts of the scientific team from the 
University of Illinois Urbana-Champagne proved to have poor germination 
rates and was susceptible to the yellow-mosaic virus (p. 49). Following 
several field and experimental trials, however, soyabean cultivation found a 
new life, and interest in it surged after it was promoted as a cash crop that 
could be processed into cattle feed (de-oiled cake – DOC) and edible oil. 
Moreover, these very same farmers also capitalised on the fact that a range 
of environmental factors enabled the soyabean to be an excellent “filler” 
crop for the region. In other words, as Kumar suggests:  

non-human factors such as the properties of the soil, the characteristics of the 
soyabean plant such as duration and tolerance to adverse conditions and the rainfall 
patterns of Malwa, were critical in providing a niche for soyabean to make itself 
comfortable. (p. 57)  

In the third chapter, the narrative of soyabean’s success is placed in the 
larger context of India’s widely celebrated Green Revolution, which helped 
boost rice and wheat production in the great northern flood plains. Here 
too, Kumar is keen to challenge the dominant narrative that the success of 
the Green Revolution prevented a Malthusian crisis in 1960s India, where 
the belief was that population growth was outstripping the ability of Indian 
agriculture to feed the country’s growing numbers. Through a careful and 



[147] Muthuvel Deivendran 

 

 
 

systematic review of the literature on the subject, Kumar, in fact, 
convincingly argues that the impacts of the Green Revolution were rather 
mixed, with a range of complications brought on by overproduction, soil 
degradation, fertilizer dependence, farmer’s debt and the emergence of a 
new kind of farmer-centred politics that forced the state to subsidize 
agriculture. In effect, for Kumar, the Yellow Revolution took the wrong 
lessons from the Green Revolution in that it framed the problem as one 
that merely requires a technical solution to address a quantitative shortfall in 
agricultural production.   

Chapters four and five go on to further scrutinize the notion of 
productivity and how to meaningfully make sense of the phenomenon of 
soyabean cultivation. For Kumar, the boon of soyabean lay not so much in 
how scientific and technological inputs boosted yields but in how the crop 
came to the rescue of small farmers because of the seed’s peculiar suitability 
to the geology and ecology of Malwa. On the other hand, however, the very 
success of soyabean cultivation increased a range of vulnerabilities for the 
farmer, with the rising demand for fertilizers and pesticides with 
remunerative prices besides the increasingly urgent need for irrigation and 
the loss of common grazing lands. Chapter six rounds up the section by 
focusing on how the migrant Adivasi (tribal) farm labourers were able to 
drive relatively better wage bargains for themselves because of the 
peculiarities inherent to the “socio-technical” arrangements that soyabean 
cultivation required.  

Chapters seven to ten switch from focusing on the soyabean revolution to 
examining the eChoupal initiative of ITC-IBD in the Malwa region. The 
eChoupal project is modelled after the notion of the traditional village 
choupal (the public meeting place) and aims to provide farmers with real-
time price information through digital connectivity. Underpinning this 
novel initiative of ITC-IBD was their strong belief that the soyabean market 
in Malwa had turned inefficient because of corrupt intermediaries—village-
level traders—who, it was held, acquired unfair rental income by controlling 
the flow of information on prices. Kumar, however, carefully and through 
detailed ethnography, unsettles this premise by effectively revealing the 
eChoupal project as but the reiteration of a steadfast faith in neo-liberal 
market practices. That is, the real effort of ITC-IBD was aimed at 
diminishing the regulatory capacity of the Indian government while further 
formalising existing soyabean market arrangements in favour of large agri-
businesses.   



 Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [148] 

Unsurprisingly, village traders or intermediaries were singled out as bad 
actors within the eChoupal initiative, which pressed forward in not only 
claiming that market inefficiencies were solely the result of skewed 
information access but that the latter’s solution lay solely in techno-
managerial fixes, i.e., by ensuring digital connectivity.  Kumar, however, 
brilliantly counters these claims by showing that the layered relationships 
between village traders and farmers were not only complicated, involving 
various levels of give-and-take, but, interestingly enough, the government-
regulated mandi enabled considerable mutual accountability and even 
offered better bargaining possibilities for the farmer. In contrast, ironically 
enough, it was the formal marketing institutions of the cooperatives and 
private companies that proved neither accessible nor accountable to the 
poor and low-caste farmers in Malwa. In effect, the eChoupal initiative 
tended to benefit the upper-caste elite farmers, often at the cost of those 
socially and politically marginal to village life, and evidently proved that 
techno-managerial arrangements tended to reinforce inequalities. 

In sum, Rethinking Revolutions makes a compelling case for us to be sceptical 
about how conventional policy narratives regarding agrarian 
transformations through techno-managerial changes in India have thus far 
been framed. Kumar, in this detailed and well-researched monograph, 
offers us fresh and original insights not only into the poorly studied Yellow 
Revolution and the information revolution in Malwa but also critically urges 
us to revise our understanding of the complexity of causes, effects, and 
impacts that agrarian transformation involves. Rethinking Revolutions is 
unquestionably a significant contribution to agrarian studies in India and 
the interdisciplinary field of Science and Technology Studies (STS). 


