Abstract

"Agribusiness and D/development: The Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad and the Corporatization of Agriculture in India"

Arun Kumar, King's College London (arun.1.kumar@kcl.ac.uk)

Agribusiness was introduced in India in 1963 as the Harvard Business School—where the field of agribusiness was inaugurated in 1955—became the technical partner in the founding of the Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad (IIM). However, the capitalist, corporatized approach to agriculture did not fit with the state-led, centralized, planned development approach adopted by India. As a result, the agribusiness group at IIM reconfigured its purview to focus on agricultural systems and co-operatives; or the ‘Ag-Co’ group in 1964. In addition to research and consultancy work, the Ag-Co group launched a two-year post-graduate programme in agricultural management. Since renamed as a programme in ‘food and agribusiness management’, it is the highest ranked programme in the world in the ‘agribusiness and food industry management’ area. In extant historiography, this has been interpreted as ‘hybridity’: where managerial techniques developed in the context of post-War U.S. capitalism were leveraged in service of Indian political and administrative elites’ developmentalism—where co-operatives not corporations dominated.

Challenging this historiography, I offer a different interpretation drawing on a longer history of IIM’s Ag-Co group and its programmes, from its founding in 1964 to 1994. I draw on the geographer Gillian Hart’s conceptualization ‘big D’ and ‘little d’ development where the former refers to ‘multiply scaled’ development projects that emerged in the second half of the twentieth century; and ‘little d’ development refers to the ‘development of capitalism as geographically uneven by spatially interconnected processes of creation and destruction’ (‘D/developments after the meltdown’, Antipode, 2009: 119). Read this way, the history of the Ag-Co group’s is less that of hybridization of management education, but more about the absorption of big D-evelopment by little d-evelopment; with its programmes training future managers to service large agricultural corporations, both Indian and multinational.