India’s development model is not development. It is accumulation by dispossession. It replaces what farmer and writer Wendell Berry calls ‘right livelihood’ based on a harmony with natural cycles with a predatory industrialism.  

Where agriculture was once a gift exchange with the earth, cultivating communal solidarity, it has been reduced to a systematic transfer of wealth, land and power from rural communities to corporate elites—a slow‑motion process on a scale that borders on the apocalyptic.  

This system is urban‑centric and corporate‑aligned and regards rural communities as expendable assets. The end-result is the erosion of rural self-sufficiency where agrarian communities are forced into precarity.   

Industrial agriculture’s obsession with ‘yield’ is a reductionist mindset. It mistakes the mass production of ‘empty’ calories for food security. In reality, agroecological systems offer far higher ‘health per acre’, providing the essential micronutrients that industrial monocrops—bloated by synthetic nitrogen and thirsty for stolen (from local communities) groundwater—simply cannot deliver. Consider that it takes roughly 3,000 to 5,000 litres of water to produce 1kg of rice, compared to approximately 200-300 litres for millets. 

A hectare of chemically grown, high-yield rice provides ‘empty’ calories (starch) but is increasingly nutritionally bankrupt. Research from the Indian Council of Agricultural Research shows that since the 1960s, the concentration of essential micronutrients like zinc and iron in wheat and rice has decreased by 30% to 45%. In contrast, an agroecological plot of millets and pulses provides significantly more iron, zinc and protein per square inch.  

Corporate agribusiness with its promotion of industrial agriculture claims to be ‘feeding the world’ but have too often fed it empty calories while starving it of nutrients. 

Urbanisation and Displacement 

Once traditional farming systems have been destabilised by a withdrawal of state support, corporate input regimes, global supply chains and monocultural production, farming becomes financially non-viable for many.  Mass migration to cities is then an inevitability. It is forced displacement. According to the World Bank, India’s urban population grew from 18% in 1960 to more than 36% in 2023. 

By forcing people into cities, the system alienates them from the sources of true vitality: the soil and the seasons. Once removed from the land, the citizen is transformed into a consumer, trapped in the rituals of materialism, trying to purchase a sense of self. 

Urbanisation forms part of a neoliberal policy framework (aligned with World Bank strategies) to move hundreds of millions of people from the land into cities while clearing the land for industrial-scale, corporate-run farming (see here).   

However, drawing on the work of Wendell Berry and others, a deep-rooted ‘agrarian imagination’ can challenge this hegemony. It offers a profound critique of mainstream development and urges a reimagining of a more just future (see here).  

The agrarian imagination involves recognising the knowledge, culture and ecological contributions of rural communities based on an alternative model that values local autonomy and ecological balance.  

Resistance Through Practice 

We can see what this might look like by turning to a recent project in Odisha, where theory has been turned into practice. The report Forgotten Foods for India’s Food Systems: Lessons from MSSRF Millet Scaling in Odisha chronicles the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation’s (MSSRF) two-decade-long intervention (2002–2025) to revive millet cultivation and consumption in India.   

It is a compelling case study of how agroecological methods and strong government policy can successfully address challenges faced by rural communities.   

The report frames millets as a ‘forgotten food’ because their cultivation was marginalised by state policies that have favoured subsidised high-yielding rice and wheat whose nutritional values have fallen significantly since the 1960s. This shift has contributed to widespread micro-nutrient deficiencies.  

Aside from the falling nutritional values, staples like millets, which are naturally superior in nutrients (iron, zinc etc.), were displaced.  Millets contain 3–5 times more iron and calcium than polished rice or processed wheat. However, Since the Green Revolution (1960s), the area under millet cultivation in India has dropped by roughly 60%, replaced by rice and wheat. 

The Odisha state government instituted a decentralised procurement system and dramatically raised the minimum support price (MSP) for millets, increasing it 11-fold. This guaranteed price was a powerful economic incentive, eliminating the risk for farmers.  

To sustain the high MSP, the government created stable high-volume demand by integrating millets into all major welfare schemes, including the Public Distribution System, the Mid-Day Meal Scheme and Integrated Child Development Services. This delivered naturally nutritious food to millions of citizens while ensuring farmers’ financial security.   

Empowering Women 

The success of the Odisha millet project serves as a powerful example of how rural communities can resist the pressures of the dominant development model. Strengthening local governance structures, like panchayats and farmer producer organisations (FPOs), offers a potential roadmap for empowering rural areas to take control of their resources and futures. 

The MSSRF project successfully scaled from five villages to impacting 7,500 farmers across 196 villages. It showcases a pathway rooted in agroecology, food sovereignty and public policy that serves ordinary people. The model is fundamentally about public control over the food supply.  

The MSSRF report is a proof-of-concept for a public-interest food system and is highly scalable and adaptable for many other similar crops and a template for state-level food system transformation.  

While the Odisha example is in part institutionally driven, the Women’s Collective (WC) of Tamil Nadu is more movement-led’ but is yet again living proof of another successful agrarian model based on the empowerment of women.  

By establishing community seed banks, the collective has severed the corporate noose of dependency: instead of buying corporate seeds every year, the women use indigenous varieties, effectively de-linking themselves from the corporate supply chain.  

The collective’s focus on millets proves that traditional, rain-fed crops provide better nutrition per acre and require zero expensive chemical inputs, directly debunking the industry claim that high-tech interventions are the only way to achieve food security. 

The women also practice ‘family first’ farming by prioritising growing diverse food for their own plates before selling anything to the market. Decisions are made in village-level sangams (collectives) based on ancestral knowledge and local weather patterns, not on algorithms owned by a multinational corporation. 

Stopping the Heist 

However, such initiatives exist in the shadow of power. The suction mechanism of neoliberalism too often makes rural life a financial impossibility for many farmers, transforming independent stewards of the land into a reserve army of labour in the cities. Policies imposed from above are the silent evictors, clearing the land for corporate-run monocultures and pushing millions towards the urban periphery to serve the very system that dispossessed them. 

Only by strengthening local governance structures, such as panchayats, co-operatives and FPOs, can we see a foundation for a more decentralised, participatory form of democracy begin to emerge.  

In this respect, the successes in Odisha and Tamil Nadu are not anomalies; they are proof that the agrarian imagination is alive. This worldview rejects the utterances of corporate executives like Simon Wiebusch of Bayer, who equate development with the erasure of rural autonomy.  

To Bayer, rural India is ‘backward’ because it is not yet fully dependent on proprietary seeds and digital advisories. But these initiatives flip that script: development should be measured by the permanence of rural life—whether a community can sustain itself across generations without corporate dependency or forced migration to urban slums. 

Rejecting Neoliberalism 

Grassroots successes like MSSRF exist in spite of the prevailing neoliberal framework. These successes and many other examples in India and from around the world are agricultural victories as much as they are acts of ideological defiance.  

Here, we see public goods reclaimed, with water, seeds and soil health treated as commons and not commodities for corporate capture. We also see the state using its procurement power to guarantee a dignified living for those who feed the nation, insulating them from the ‘race to the bottom’ of global markets.  

In effect, power shifts from the self-appointed ‘saviours’ in corporate boardrooms to the grass roots. It demonstrates that rural renewal is not nostalgia for the past but an active reclamation and recognises that a civilisation cannot survive if it destroys the land, the people who care for it and the knowledge systems that sustain life.  

The question is no longer whether alternatives exist; they do and are thriving wherever communities are allowed to breathe. The real question is whether the forces of dispossession will be permitted to bury them. 

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