Overview

How the debate over genetically modified crops in India is transforming science and politics Genetically modified or transgenic crops are controversial across the world. Advocates see such crops as crucial for the economic and environmental sustainability of farming; critics oppose them on these very grounds. India leads the world in terms of the intensity of democratic engagement with genetically modified crops. Anthropologist Aniket Aga excavates the genealogy of the ongoing debate around the commercial release of transgenic food crops in India, investigating how democracy is transformed when conflicts of interest clash with disputes over truth.

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Aniket Aga's Genetically Modified Democracy explores transgenic crops in all their historical and contextual contingency, revealing what they can tell us about state practice, bureaucracy, justice claims, and the agrarian economy. -Sarah Besky, author of Tasting Qualities: The Past and Future of Tea Anyone interested in the intersections of science, policy and democracy in the Global South will find Genetically Modified Democracy a fascinating case study, and anyone interested in the future of the world's most populous democracy and the crisis of its agrarian sector will find many important insights. - Ian Scoones, co-director STEPS Centre, Institute of Development Studies, University of Sussex With sensitivity and analytical insight, Aniket Aga lays bare the invisible links between governmental ambitions, science-technology claims, and civil society assertions that are now cultivating new cultures in India's agriculture. -A.R. Vasavi, author of Shadow Space: Suicides and the Predicament of Rural India With crystal clarity, Aniket Aga delivers a deeply textured analysis of India's scientific enterprises, regulatory agencies, and home-grown businesses in the GM revolution. The result deftly complicates global accounts of the GM controversy. -Julie Guthman, author of Wilted: Pathogens, Chemicals, and the Fragile Future of the Strawberry Industry Technologies don't float freely. In this superlatively detailed ethnography, Aniket Aga shows the pesticide industry sparred with its opponents from the fields to the Supreme Court in India, demonstrating how technology and state come to constitute, and reconstitute, one another. - Raj Patel, Research Professor, University of Texas at Austin

Author Information

Aniket Aga is an associate professor of environmental studies at Ashoka University in Sonipat, Haryana, India. His research on science, politics, and agrarian change in India won the 2016 Sardar Patel Award from the University of California, Los Angeles, and the 2019–20 Bharadwaj-Wolf Prize from the Journal of Peasant Studies.

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