More-than-human infrapolitics in an Indian tech-entrepreneurial sustainability program

Abstract

Alternate wetting and drying of rice fields—aimed at mitigating emissions by killing methanogenic soil bacteria—has gained traction among tech-entrepreneurs as a scalable sustainability solution in contemporary agriculture. Drawing on institutional ethnography conducted at a sustainability-promising agricultural technology (agtech) start-up in India, this article demonstrates how the company’s field staff—rural youth hired on a contractual, incentive-driven basis—turned to the affordances of rodents, snakes, digital tools, and rice plants to subtly resist the start-up’s performance demands while securing their livelihoods. Extending James Scott’s concept of “infrapolitics,” the article introduces “more-than-human infrapolitics” to describe how the subtle everyday acts of resistance emerged relationally, co-constituted by interactions among humans, crops, technologies, and ecological processes. Paradoxically, these cumulative acts did not obstruct the company’s broader goal of generating carbon credits; instead, they inadvertently enabled it, allowing the firm to present the program as a success despite its flawed implementation on farmers’ fields. In contrast to Scott’s formulation, these minor acts of defiance ultimately provided short-term reinforcement to the tech-driven sustainability agenda.