Ashoka University is a private university located in Sonipat, Haryana, India, focusing on liberal arts and sciences. It was established in 2014.&nbsp;It is guided by an academic council of academics and scholars from around the world. The council sets the university&#39;s academic standard, advising on matters of curriculum, faculty hiring and research.&nbsp;

Ashoka University offers a full-time 3 (+ 1) year undergraduate programme. The University comprises of&nbsp;2500 plus students, with a mix of both national and international students.&nbsp; &nbsp;

&nbsp;

&nbsp;

Ashoka University

Department of Environmental Studies

Yale Agrarian Studies Series

Genetically Modified Democracy: Transgenic Crops in Contemporary India

A fierce controversy over genetically modified (GM) crops has been raging in India for over two decades. Analyzing India’s regulatory regime for GM crops, this article focuses on the modes through which state bureaucracies know the environment. It argues that two epistemologies - scientific and legal-administrative – underpin environment protection. By unraveling the course of regulatory disputes, I demonstrate that bureaucracies are not just hierarchically divided but are also segmented by horizontal, functional specializations. There is thus an inherent ambiguity lodged between environment as a technical discourse and as statecraft. This ambiguity both fosters and constrains democratic participation in policy decisions and can even partially disrupt power relations in unanticipated ways. © 2021 SAGE Publications.

Journal of Developing Societies

Environment and its Forms of Knowledge: The Regulation of Genetically Modified Crops in India

This article traces how substantive decision-making power over extractive projects is denied to India’s indigenous and forest-dwelling communities, even as they have clinched rights to ownership and consent under the landmark Forest Rights Act of 2006. By examining the consent mechanism provided under the act, we contend that the possibilities, and limits of such mechanisms are shaped by the larger architecture of the state-bureaucratic apparatus and practices that govern the process of transferring forests (“forest diversion” in bureaucratese) from rural communities to corporations. By analyzing a case of a forest diversion proposal for an iron ore mine in India’s resource-rich state of Odisha, we argue that consent provisions are derailed by “bureaucratic sabotage,” i.e. the power of corporations and state officials to control and manipulate the movement and circulation of documents through different tiers of government. In conclusion, we offer some thoughts on the weaknesses of the FPIC mechanism and the possible ways to address some of these. However, ultimately, the larger implication of such sabotage is the headlong collision between FPIC provisions and the principle of eminent domain. For FPIC to be meaningful, in India and globally, this fundamental contradiction must be confronted and resolved in favor of resource justice. © 2019, © 2019 The Center for Political Ecology.

World University root node

Capitalism, Nature, Socialism

Manufacturing Consent: Mining, Bureaucratic Sabotage and the Forest Rights Act in India

This article focuses on the young men from agrarian backgrounds who work as field marketing agents for companies like Monsanto in western Maharashtra, India. They promote pesticides, herbicides and other agrichemicals to farmers who often belong to higher castes. My ethnography suggests that the promotion of agrichemicals deploys the idiom of agricultural extension, upsetting India's tenacious social hierarchies on the one hand, and driving corporate profits and indebtedness among farmers on the other. With respect to the subordination of agriculture to industrial capital, I contend that farmers and marketing agents can neither be arrayed against one another, nor is their relation to industrial capital alike. Agrichemicals marketing troubles dichotomous frameworks, such as farmers against industrial capital. Ultimately, I call for re-conceiving political economy in terms of graded informality, where opportunities and constraints for accumulation map onto a gradient, rather than fall on opposite ends of a binary. © 2019, © 2019 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.