Hybrid Realities: making a new Green Revolution for rice in south India

Indian policy makers and agronomists often argue that hybrid rice varieties can help raise aggregate yields to address food security and improve rural incomes. Indian farmers, however, have proved hesitant to embrace this technology. To explain the disjuncture, this paper analyses the case of a publicly developed and promoted hybrid variety in southern Karnataka. It highlights how, within the context of growing social polarisation and an increasingly water-scarce agrarian environment, many smallholders found the hybrid unsuited to cultivation strategies that increasingly sought to minimise risk. The paper therein further illustrates the limits of technological solutions to contemporary agrarian distress.