‘Yeh aankdon ki puri ladai hai. Aankdon ke aadhaar par humko ladni hai (This is a battle of numbers, and we must fight it with numbers)’.1 This quote is taken from a news article about farmers who objected to crop damages as calculated by agricultural insurance companies. When I read it, the quote piqued my interest as it was exactly the kind of strategy I had encountered while working with a farmers organisation called Shetkari Sangathna, operating in the village of Satpur in 2018.2 I became interested in Shetkari Sangathna because they were engaged in a protracted conflict with one of India's largest commercial insurance companies. Their contention was that the insurance company had incorrectly calculated the damages to their crops and was thus unfair. To corroborate this allegation, members of the organisation delved into the quantified procedures of the insurance company. They tirelessly gathered and scrutinised the damage surveys, measurement techniques, mathematical formulas and actuarial calculations that underpin the insurance scheme. Over the course of a year, members of Shetkari Sangathna progressively came to the insight that the lustre of objectivity emanating from quantified measures obscured the very messy practice of their production. In repeating that they ‘just want to know how the insurance amount was calculated’, Shetkari Sangathna called insurance companies to account by mobilising the moral legitimacy of quantitative knowledge that insurance companies also employ to ensure the equitable optics of their scheme: numbers do not lie.
Indian policy-makers seem increasingly drawn to the allure of insurance to address rural poverty. While life insurance has historically been one of the first formal financial services offered to rural Indians, since the middle of the 2010s health insurance3, pension schemes4 and livestock insurance5 were added to the list of financial interventions targeted at managing the many risks inherent to rural livelihoods. One of the most ambitious insurance initiatives, called Pradhan Mantri Faisal Bima Yoyana (Prime minister's crop insurance scheme), was launched in 2016 as a public–private partnership between the Indian government and private insurance companies. PMFBY is a subsidised crop insurance scheme that protects farmers against crop loss due to natural disaster. At the time of research, it was one of the largest crop insurance schemes in the world, with 47 million policy holders in 2017–2018, most of whom are small-scale farmers (Rai 2019: 6). The succinct English slogan for the scheme, ‘Insuring crops, ensuring happiness’, stands as a testimony to the link many insurance professionals see between insurance and the well-being of farmers. The Indian government, on their part, present it as a ‘panacea’ that will help offset the increasingly precarious realities of contemporary Indian agriculture.6 In this regard, scholars, policy-makers and development literature tend to agree that dwindling landholdings, mounting debts and changing weather cycles wreak havoc on the sustainability of the agricultural sector. Moreover, these issues disproportionately affect small-scale, rain-fed agriculture of the kind the rural poor overwhelmingly engage in (Reddy and Mishra 2012; Shiva and Kunwar 2010; Walker 2008).
The solution agricultural insurance represents is highly technocratic. To ‘ensure’ the happiness of farmers, as the slogan promises, insurance companies employ a complex arrangement of agricultural surveying techniques and statistical modelling to aggregate damage to crops in a designated area. They do this to bring back the complicated phenomenon of agricultural misfortune to an easily quantifiable metric: the average damage in an area. All the risks farmers are imagined to face are tied to this indicator, with the underlying promise that if this indicator can be managed efficiently, all will be well for the vulnerable rural poor. This is called index insurance and experts deem it attractive because of the rational and a-political connotations associated with such quantified ways of measuring damage.
For many insurance professionals, this axiomatic virtue of insurance to right societal wrongs is what justifies their work. For instance, Thomas, an actuary who was involved in the implementation of PMFBY, told me all that was needed to alleviate the crisis was putting the right numbers in the right formulas. He asserted that: ‘You see, the better we are able to gather data, the better our prices will be, the lower the cost will be for the government and the better it will be for society and farmers’. He went on to explain that providing effective insurance is a matter of getting a detailed understanding of damages in agricultural areas through agricultural surveys and then plugging these measurements into mathematical formulas that calculate quantified pecuniary equivalents for the damage suffered. Such insurance logic puts the explanatory potential of quantification and its associated notions of technocratic distance, accuracy and a-political proceduralism in service of achieving just and morally desirable outcomes. Thomas assured me that, through insurance, the people who need help get it, and get it according to transparent and measurable standards.
In this article I explore the relationship between insurance logic and rural politics surrounding agricultural misfortune in Maharashtra, India. This relationship, I demonstrate, is informed by moral notions associated with insurance quantification. Insurance moves misfortune to the confines of statistical probability and science, and its management to the operation of efficient bureaucratic institutions (Ewald 2002: 273–274). To experts like Thomas, insurance represents a powerful mechanism to govern rural misfortune with calculation and quantified procedures. Cris Shore and Susan Wright (2015: 22–23) argue that such governing through numbers has become a defining feature of contemporary governmentality, which has had far-reaching consequences for the ways in which power is configured, governance is imagined and subjectivities take shape. The language of numbers in governance, they show, is increasingly hard to resist because it is rooted so strongly in objectivist notions. To speak with Sally Engle Merry (2011), contemporary policy increasingly banks on ‘the magic of numbers and the appearance of certainty and objectivity that they convey’ (2011: S84). Numbers give legitimacy to policy-makers because they de-personalise decisions and offer a lustre of objectivity to policy interventions. Insurance conceived in this way becomes a quintessential form of technomoral governance. It derives its legitimacy exactly from the axiomatic virtues of implementing a-political quantified logic in service of societal problems. The quote by Thomas confidently ‘fuses the moral and technical’ (Acosta et al this issue) by suggesting that the good of insurance comes from its ability to transform misfortune into risk percentages that it manages through effective pricing (see also Ewald 2002: 297). For those enamoured by such logic, what is morally ‘right’ is that which can be ascertained through rational calculation.
Seen in this way, insurance represents a sophisticated ‘anti-politics machine’ (Ferguson 1994). Critical literature underscores this depoliticising character of agricultural insurance by suggesting that the technicality of insurance masks the deeply political, contextual and relational dynamics endemic to rural misfortune (e.g. Da Costa 2013; Isakson 2015; Taylor 2016).7 Such work has done much to show the structural power dynamics that underlie these institutional arrangements. It forces the conclusion that insurance is not the axiomatic risk mitigation and financial device that it portrays itself to be (see also Bähre 2020). Instead, agricultural insurance represents a particular modality of institutional logic based in supposedly a-political proceduralism, which normalises, enacts and safeguards sets of assumptions about risk, the knowledge production techniques it uses to measure this risk and the (economic) relationships it underwrites (Da Costa 2013: 848; Johnson 2021). While these studies are therefore useful to scrutinise the effects insurance has on social relations, viewing insurance as a system that unidirectionally dictates action, circumscribes knowledge and regulates rural relations does occlude the fact that financial governance is always ‘peopled’ (Kar 2013: 482).
In this regard, Claire Wendland argues that the factuality of numbers has to be enacted in practice. She shows that while calculations are often made to do the work of facts, they function more like ‘the moral of a story’ (2016: 85). These stories are formulated, (re)told, contemplated and have to be reckoned with at the everyday level. Moreover, Anna Echterhölter (2017: 35) notes that the symbolism of numbers has to be enacted in practice through performative acts. This is particularly true when quantities are expressed in monetary amounts, as is the case with insurance (see Ross et al 2017: 2). I subscribe to this approach and see numbers and the calculations in which they are used as one way the material world is portrayed rather than representing any definitive objectivity. I interrogate the ways in which the languages, grammars and moralities of quantification have implications for the practices associated with – and the stories told through – numbers at the everyday level by political organisations such as Shetkari Sangathna. Adams (2016: 11–12) notes that such an ethnographic approach to quantification is useful as it has the potential to bring to light those processes that the calculative logic of numbers do not.
With this article I draw on such an ethnographic attitude to delve into the ‘qualities of quantity’ (cf. Echterhölter 2017). This allows me to highlight that, while the overbearing explanatory potential of insurance numbers is pertinent, it has certainly not done away with politics. Rather, the terms of the debate have shifted towards a discussion of numbers. I focus on this symbolic power of quantified idioms to argue that the language of numbers is increasingly involved in shaping articulations of political contestation surrounding rural misfortune in India. To do so, I show how Shetkari Sangathna staked its political claim on the supposedly ‘value-free’ and ‘a-political’ language of numbers. Shetkari Sangathna is a loosely affiliated group that finds its ideological basis with the work of Sharad Joshi, who founded the organisation in 1979 with the goal to demand ‘Freedom of access to markets and to technology’.8 The group I worked with was comprised of roughly fifty people, all men, and all from Satpur and the surrounding villages. Members tended be farmers in some capacity; as tenants and freeholders but also as landlords and speculators. Alongside a considerable body of farmers, members included lawyers, engineers, business owners and IT specialists. With the seemingly innocent statement that ‘they just want to know how the damage was calculated’, they insisted that the insurance company adheres to its technomoral commitments of transparency, efficiency, quality and good governance that quantified insurance logic implies.
Such political claim-making within the confines of systems of technomoral governance has been usefully described by Erica Bornstein and Aradhana Sharma (2016) as technomoral politics. With the term they problematise the demoralising and depoliticising force often assumed to be emanating from such technocratic conceptions of development. They show how activism in India has moved into the realm of the technical and the legal, which means that moral contentions increasingly play out in a technical language. Politics have taken on ‘judicialised forms’ (2016: 86) where the language and infrastructure of the law is utilised by both state and non-state actors to stake moral claims and vice-versa; to justify technocratic acts as moral imperatives. They demonstrate how activist groups ground their ‘technical, legal demands for reform in moral claims about justice’ (2016: 80) and explore how participation in – and speaking the language of – the legal arena becomes instrumental to the strategies of activist groups. More so, they argue that instead of relegating politics to the margin, judicialised activism constitutes ‘an alteration in the form of politics’ (2016: 78, emphasis in original). Politics remain, but the idioms and arenas where stakes are claimed and goals are pursued are expressed increasingly in a technomoral language. In short, rather than depoliticising, the notion of technomorality can help understand how rural issues in India have moralised and subsequently politicised in novel, technocratic, idioms.
In Bornstein and Sharma's conceptualisation, the ‘techno’ refers predominantly to the language of law and policy. They look at the ways in which India's transparency laws amplified the role of legal language and procedures in political contestation. I contribute to these insights by extending them into the realm of numbers and objectified knowledge. In the case of Shetkari Sangathna, I find that while the morally absolutist terms of objectified ‘rights’ and ‘wrongs’ that the technomoral governance of insurance introduces to everyday understandings of rural misfortune is significant, such absolutist terms do – in fact – leave room for political claim-making. The organisation did this by appropriating the legitimacy of quantification in service of their political project. To bring this into view, I follow Bornstein and Sharma (2016) in their conceptualisation of the ‘moral’ as an everyday practice. Although they do not explicitly operationalise the moral part of ‘technomoral’, they clearly and repeatedly refer to morality as a process; they talk of moral positioning, moral idioms and moral projects (2016: 82, 87, 77, respectively). From this emerges a position on morality that is processual and relational; that it is in the daily encounters with technocratic governance structures that these new forms of morality take shape.
I draw on this insight to suggest that the shift in political vocabularies towards quantified idioms is significant because it potentially has far-reaching effects on the terms of the political debate surrounding rural misfortune in India. Sharma (2013) reminds us that on the one hand politicising such technocratic procedures and associated vocabularies has the potential to upend established hierarchies of knowledge. Questioning technocracy means demanding transparency and accountability from structures of technomoral governance in a common language of proceduralism. This can be a powerful tool ‘to contest dominant political order’ (Acosta et al., this issue) as it meets structures of technomoral governance ‘on its own terms’. On the other hand, Sharma (2013) warns against overstating the emancipatory potential of such vocabularies. Reframing political contestation in technocratic language facilitates increasingly authoritarian rule as it ‘bureaucratizes social lives and activism, forcing ordinary individuals to become competent in a specific kind of technical literacy’ (2013: 315). Whether one is able to participate in this political arena depends to a significant extent on one's educational background and bureaucratic aptitude as well as the ability – and time – to familiarise oneself with technocratic procedures.
Julia Eckert (2006, 2012) makes a similar case. She shows that as people struggle against the legal dominance of the state, they are increasingly caught up in the ideas and expectations of governance perpetuated by the law. In practising such ‘legalism from below’, Eckert argues that ‘rather than rebelling outright [people] enter into the rules of the game and hold those rules against those who represent them’ (2006: 71). In this situation, fundamentally questioning and protesting the law is increasingly difficult. Although people are thus increasingly co-opted into structures of power, Eckert (2012) simultaneously notes that this does not preclude agency, but rather shapes it in incremental ways. Such ‘slow and small transformations’, she notes, are moreover not uniform but heterogeneous and depend on individual circumstances and embedding in power relations (2012: 162–163, 167).
The case of Shetkari Sangathna shows that, while heavily mediated by institutions and the language of quantification, such practices do have productive potential. However, to speak with Miriam Ticktin, the question is ‘productive of what?’ (2011: 19). What is gained and lost in meeting insurance companies ‘on their own terms’? And, importantly, who is able to assert their agency in these new arenas of politicised quantified logic, and how? These questions are increasingly important in India as digital governance and its associated technomoral promises are generally received with enthusiasm by Indian policy-makers. Especially when it comes to financial innovation, India often proves a receptive testing ground for new digital technology. Specifically, the ‘Digital India’ project aims to introduce and extend financial services to the rural ‘unbanked masses’.9 One of the defining features of financial technology is that it ultimately refers to pecuniary practices, meanings and materialities. This makes the study of the political life of numbers particularly urgent in the Indian context, as finance invokes ‘money's arithmetic potential and properties’ and introduces new quantified vocabularies that people increasingly have to reckon with (Ross et al 2017: 5).
Meeting Insurance on its Own Terms
Satish, Ganesh, my research assistant Nikhil and I were sitting on the floor of a small two-bedroom apartment that functions as the headquarters of Shetkari Sangathna.10 As I struggled to find a comfortable position on the concrete floor, young men wearing the red badge signifying their affiliation to the organisation rushed in and out to use the copier in one corner of the room and to catch a glimpse of the unfamiliar sight of a foreigner. So far, we had archived close to 290 different documents and pieced them together in a more or less coherent chronological order. Organised in this way, the documents showed how Shetkari Sangathna had contested the damage calculation the insurance company had done for soybean in the area in the summer of 2017. A dizzying number of circulars, political pamphlets, tables, surveys, operational guidelines and calculations scribbled on loose pieces of paper were spread on the ground around us. I was introduced to Satish and Ganesh by an acquaintance and first met them in their small office in Satpur in the latter half of 2018. Satpur is a village in Marathwada, a region known as a place where the problems associated with contemporary Indian agriculture are particularly urgent. Satpur, like many villages in the region, is a dry place and the majority of farmers in the area depend on rainfall for their water supply.
The men explained that the conflict started with a simple observation: while the soybean in the area had been significantly damaged by a dry spell in 2017, nobody who had taken out crop insurance in Satpur had received compensation from the insurance company. At the time, Satish thought this was curious. Since he had sustained a substantial loss to his own business, he went to the local bank that had sold him the policy. He quickly found out that there was no answer beyond the fact that nothing had come from the insurance company. Unsatisfied, he approached the local agricultural officer, but here he was put off with similar non-committal language. The government officials promised that they would look into the case, but did not seem in a hurry to do so. At this point, he was joined in his efforts by Ganesh, another member of the organisation, whose extended family had also suffered considerable losses. Together they observed that no one in the town office was willing or able to give any concrete information about the lack of insurance compensation. They also found out that there were more people who were facing similar problems in the area, as it seemed no one had received any compensation. The two men returned to the bank and agricultural office multiple times to request information about the lack of pay-out, but were met with dismissal at every turn. Back at their headquarters, Ganesh pointed at a handwritten document asking the local bank for insight into the surveys done in the area of Satpur. ‘Basically we just wanted to know how this insurance was calculated. But nobody was willing to give us this information’, he summarised the issue at the heart of the contention that would follow.
While broadly falling under the category ‘farmer’, Ganesh and Satish do not conform to the common stereotype often associated with that term in the Indian context. They were neither poor nor marginal, not so much the victim of agricultural distress as businessmen with a large network of family, political compatriots and employees. Both came from a higher caste background and had considerable personal holdings. Despite this relatively privileged socio-economic background, the men told me they had little in the way of formal education, meaning that they felt lacking in knowledge and expertise when they first started to delve into the confusing technicalities of crop insurance. ‘It was a frustrating and nervous experience. Because we were not sure about where to go and what to ask, the only thing we knew is that something was not right’, Satish told me in his calm voice. However, because they were part of Shetkari Sangathna, they had access to people who could help them understand the legal and calculative aspects of the policy.
With this help, their suspicion that something was ‘not right’ gradually came to be supported by the documents that were now spread out before us. To start, they consulted the procedural guideline of the scheme that they found online. They told me that from this document they surmised that the procedure dictates that crop insurance compensation is to be based on average yield measurements determined by crop cutting experiments. These experiments are to be done by randomly selecting a ten by ten metre plot on which the crop is to be harvested and weighed by agricultural surveyors employed by the insurance company and an agricultural officer from the local agricultural department. The guideline continued that a predetermined number of these experiments are to determine the average yield in wide areas, which in this case was the whole Satpur sub-county.11 The procedure notes that this information is then to be compared to the historical average yield and if the measured average is significantly lower, all farmers enrolled for crop insurance in the area are to receive a pay-out proportionate to the damage suffered. Importantly Satish and Ganesh also learned from the guideline that the surveyors are to draw up a report for each of these experiments, which is to contain a brief description of the procedure of the individual sample cutting, images of the procedure, as well as the outcome of the measurements. The procedural guideline notes that surveyors should forward this report to the insurance company and the local agricultural department.
The two men told me that shortly after the dismissal from the bank and agricultural offices, they decided to file a request to obtain the reports of these experiments. India's transparency laws permit Indian citizens access to government documentation and I was told that, since the surveying procedure was carried out under the auspices of an agricultural officer and archived by the agricultural department, they were able to request access. And indeed, two weeks after filing the request, the organisation received the documents. Back at the office, Ganesh dug through a pile of papers and showed me a binder of forms with numbers on them. At first it did not tell them much, he admitted, but after going through the documents they found that there had been many irregularities in the experiments. They told me that the procedural guideline stipulates that twenty-four surveys had to be conducted, but in the case of Satpur only twelve were actually done. Moreover, they told me that the files they had obtained showed that, of these twelve surveys, six were rejected by the insurance company outright as they failed to meet the standards of procedure. They also told me they discovered that one of the surveys was done in one of the very few irrigated farms in Satpur, which heavily skewed the data. Seeing as the sample consisted of only six experiments for an area of roughly 100 square kilometres of farmland, the inclusion of an irrigated farm meant that the calculation done by the insurance company showed much higher yields than the rest of the area, which had been significantly affected by a lack of rain. The duo told me that this was considered to be particularly unfair by members of the organisation, as this irrigated farm is one of only a handful in the area and its yields were now used as a proxy to calculate the damage in the entire area.
It is worth stopping here for a moment to reflect on the strategies employed by Shetkari Sangathna. As we have seen, crop insurance claims legitimacy by suggesting that financial technology and damage calculation through aggregate statistics are able to accurately and fairly calculate and compensate farmers’ misfortune. As it became clear that something was amiss in the calculation of the insurance pay-out, Ganesh and Satish familiarised themselves with the procedure of the insurance scheme and made use of the infrastructure of the law to gain access to the raw data the insurance company produced. Also note that the men did not dispute that numbers are an adequate measure of farmers’ misfortune. Instead they questioned the validity of the measurements taken. This is significant, as ethnographies of quantification often describe activist groups who either reject expert knowledge on ontological grounds (e.g. Li 2015), suggest alternative indicators (e.g. Ballestero 2012) or make their own measurements (e.g. Kimura 2019). By stating that they ‘just want to know how it is calculated’ and attempting to hold those responsible accountable for the accuracy of the measurements, Ganesh and Satish implied that in principle, the quantification of misfortune is not at stake. Rather they contended that miscalculations were made due to a breach of procedure. Shetkari Sangathna turned the claim that accurate and transparent calculation leads to fair outcomes for farmers, a claim that crop insurance companies have so carefully fashioned for themselves, into a potent critique.
The men soon realised that this language opened space for political and moral contestation. After some deliberation about what to do next, members of Shetkari Sangathna decided to turn to the Collector – the highest administrative official in the district. The men said that initially they were waved off with similar disinterestedness to that which they had encountered at the bank and agricultural office. However, they told me they insisted that they held evidence that the insurance company had misrepresented the damage calculation. They urged the Collector to set up a meeting with a representative from the insurance company to discuss the matter. ‘We kept annoying him during his open office hours’, Ganesh told me with a smile. Eventually, the Collector gave in and organised a video conference with a representative from the insurance company. Ganesh, who was present, alleged that during the meeting the insurance representative gave very different numbers from what they had gathered themselves. The numbers cited by the insurance spokesperson were thus quickly countered. The men recounted with evident satisfaction that the insurance representative was shaken by their knowledge and quickly ended the conversation with promises to the Collector that he would look into the matter.
The Collector stated that he had now done all that he could. He told the men that he was concerned about the incompatible numbers, but that the matter ultimately lay with the insurance company. He tried to calm the sensibilities of those present and asked the men to be patient and wait for the follow-up from the representative. Back at their office, Ganesh reflected on how the meeting had frustrated him. Again they had been dismissed. Members of the organisation decided that they did not want to wait patiently, as the Collector had suggested. Instead they organised a sit-in in front of the Collector's office, a common tactic in this part of India to be heard by those in power. Members of the organisation kept a constant vigil and continued to demand that the experiments be rectified to reflect the damages suffered. While the sit-in took place, a member of the organisation reflected on the motivation for the request. He told me: ‘We do not want to beg, this is the main thing. [. . .] This means that they have to make the calculations and not make up information, not treat it like another channel for politics, like it is a hand-out from the government.’
It was here, at the office of the Collector, that the idiom of quantification as a means to mobilise legitimacy was on full display. The last quote is particularly salient as an example of technomoral politics by the organisation. It points to the moral weight that numbers carry to tell ‘stories’ about truth, transparency and virtuous objectivism. The insurance representative aimed to defend the position of the company by drawing on the supposedly incontrovertible factuality of numbers. In doing so, he was hoping to dispel allegations of arbitrariness and defend the position that insurance is a form of ‘objective’ technomoral governance. However, this story about the factuality of insurance logic was shaken when the organisation challenged the numbers with a story of their own in a common language of quantification. The indeterminacy that this caused cast doubt on the objectivist underpinnings of insurance logic. Such inconsistency is unthinkable as the moral legitimacy of insurance as a solution to rural misfortune rests on notions of factuality obtained through rational proceduralism. After all, objectivity does not tolerate contradiction.
The members of the organisation expertly manoeuvred to put pressure on this sore spot and stated that all they wanted was a fair calculation and not have these calculations be treated as a channel for politics. This demand usefully portrays the claims made through numbers by Shetkari Sangathna as based in ‘objective’ truth, while those of the company numbers were relegated to the category of ‘politics’. In doing so, the members of Shetkari Sangathna were able to convincingly tell their story in reference to ‘objective truth’ and lay claim on the moral legitimacy that is fused with technocratic calculation; what is fair is what is counted.
Something which is Due to Us
As the sit-in progressed, it became clear that the members of the organisation had stumbled on a sensitive issue. ‘PMFBY is a flagship scheme of the Modi government. So, they don't want any controversy surrounding the scheme’, Satish recounted at the office, while he showed me photos of the protest. ‘This was a high voltage situation and we quickly noticed that they were going soft’. During the sit-in, various local officials from the agricultural department and Collectors’ office talked with the leaders of the protest, with promises to solve the issue. However, the voltage was ramped up when some people from Shetkari Sangathna decided it was time for a more hands-on form of agitation. On the morning of 26 June 2018, around 50 people went to the agricultural office of Parbhani, the headquarters of the highest agricultural officer in the area. Ganesh, who organised this protest, told me that when they arrived they locked the gates, destroyed some office property and manhandled an agricultural officer who tried to stop them.12 Eventually, the police forced their way in and arrested eight members and filed criminal charges against them. Somewhat triumphantly, Ganesh, who was among those arrested, showed me photographs of the event on his phone. It shows an office with broken chairs and men holding up a banner with a political slogan on it, as well as the red insignia of Shetkari Sangathna. He recounted: ‘Sometimes you just need to go and smash things. We were tired of waiting.’
Despite the arrests – or perhaps because of them – the action proved highly successful. It was covered widely in local and state media, giving new impetus to their cause. Concurrently, the sit-in escalated into a hunger strike, with a number of people from the organisation vowing not to eat until their grievances had been addressed.13 Meanwhile, the protesters became increasingly hostile, no doubt in part due to hunger, but also because momentum seemed to gather for their cause. The men told me that every morning a delegation of farmers would meet with the Collector to discuss their demands. These amounted to being allowed to review the numbers the insurance company had used to arrive at the damage estimate and pay-out. All the while they kept repeating that all they wanted was to know how the insurance had been calculated, a request that seemed to become more powerful with every failure of the insurance company to meet it.
The pressure mounted on the Collector, particularly since the insurance company did not engage with the issue after the initial meeting. After five days of hunger strike, the Collector gave in and organised a meeting with his boss, the state revenue minister. The minister gave directions to the agricultural superintendent, the district-level representative of the agricultural ministry, to solve the issue immediately. The minister also told the protesters that if the insurance company would not be willing to help them that they would give them aid from the National Disaster Relief Fund. This was probably a promise meant to defuse the situation, but it fanned the flames of the initial grievance. Satish recounted: ‘This made many of us very angry. We were not there to beg for aid. We were there to get what we paid for, something which is due to us!’ He explained that they did not want government help but that they had come to see themselves as customers who were owed money. They wanted their insurance money not out of government benevolence but because they had paid for it and were eligible for it. Satish said: ‘“We don't want to beg for your help” we told the superintendent, “we just want what we are due”.’
Seen from the vantage point of technomoral politics, this insistence that the members of the organisation wanted what they were due as determined by procedure was politically expedient. It further cemented the position that the farmers were simply requesting what insurance procedure dictated. In doing so, they strategically positioned themselves as subjects of insurance calculation and its associated financial governance. In assuming such a subordinate role vis-à-vis the technomoral governance of insurance, they mobilised the claims of objectivity that underpinned the scheme to contest the current dominant position of the insurance company. The farmers positioned themselves as customers who are under the same obligation to adhere to the quantified governance structures of insurance as the company. To an extent, this had the effect of upending the hierarchies of knowledge that the insurance company capitalised i.e. promises of transparency, measurability and fairness that legitimised the insurance scheme. In doing so, the members of the organisation highlighted the shortcomings of insurance from the perspective of its own technomoral commitments. By rejecting to accommodate alternative solutions for their grievance, they usefully drove a wedge between these commitments of fairness through quantification and the in-transparency they encountered. This seemed to make both government officials and insurance representatives uneasy. Insisting on accommodation demonstrated to the members of the organisation that the insurance calculation was indeed messy, incongruous and perhaps even purposefully illegible.
Despite the objections, and seemingly out of nowhere, a few weeks after the meeting with the minister, the men told me that a number of farmers in Satpur had 5,200 rupees deposited in their account.14 While the leadership of the organisation was unsatisfied with this turn of events, it did convince many farmers to abandon the sit-in, to the point where it lost momentum and eventually fizzled out. Back at the office of the organisation, Satish took a binder filled with photocopies and showed me the receipts. He added: ‘So the money did not come from the insurance company, it came from some other fund’. Ganesh interceded, increasingly agitated, grabbed the receipts from his colleague, pointed to them and with a wry smile told me: ‘We did not agree with this. We wanted to know what was calculated and get that from the insurance company.’ Rhetorically, he added: ‘On which basis are you giving us this? What kind of calculation did you make on this?’ The men explained to me that when they came back to the agricultural department with these questions, they noticed that the officers now considered the matter resolved. They were dismissive of further questions and told the men that they had been instructed not to take up further complaints.
Somewhat anticlimactic, this is where the documents we compiled chronologically on the floor of the office came to the current date. When I asked them what their next step would be, Ganesh shared his resolve to go to Mumbai and stage another protest, this time at the offices of the insurance company. Satish, on his part, seemed more discouraged. He pointed to the frustrating reality that despite all their efforts nothing had changed. He proclaimed bitterly: ‘After all these months I really do not know anymore’. A gloom descended on us as we silently acknowledged the fact that despite their efforts things still did not add up.
Conclusion
In this article I argue that the notion of technomoral politics is useful to point at a new form of politics in India that moralises and politicises quantified vocabularies employed by financial governance structures like insurance. Crop insurance in India is a potent form of technomoral governance where moral positions on rural misfortune and technocratic ideas about its management mingle. Insurance companies assert that rural misfortune can be expressed in numbers and brought under control through financial calculation and sophisticated measuring techniques. This confidence in quantification is accompanied by moral pronouncements that crop insurance protects the rural poor in a transparent and equitable way. Seen through the lens of insurance logic, what is morally ‘right’ in relation to rural misfortune is that which can be stated as ‘fact’ and supported by numbers. Many scholars have emphasised how this overbearing explanatory potential and axiomatic virtue of objective calculation precludes contestation and makes alternative explanations difficult to articulate. Insurance logic spurs an ‘absolutist’ narrative, where moral legitimacy comes to reside in stringent adherence to calculative procedures. As these procedures are themselves suspended in notions of efficiency, transparency and mathematical fairness, they potentially sideline politics, since the operation of numbers by insurance companies comes to dictate what is morally right.
Despite such depoliticising readings, the case of Shetkari Sangathna shows how quantified logic and associated vocabularies have not done away with political contestation surrounding rural misfortune. Instead they have reconfigured it. The case I present shows that farmers in Satpur are not passive onlookers who sit idly by as technocratic forms of governance depoliticise rural misfortune. Instead, they proved capable of moralising and politicising the objectivist underpinnings of insurance. Ganesh, Satish and other members of the organisation insisted that they ‘just’ want to know how insurance was calculated. This statement showed the power of technomoral politics to impinge on universal claims to objectivity through quantification as the insurance company failed to answer it adequately. The indeterminacy this caused shook the unambiguous moral virtues of financial governance through calculation. This turned out to be the fulcrum for a political claim as it painfully pointed to the failure of insurance to make good on its own technomoral promises. To belabour Wendland's (2016) metaphor: Shetkari Sangathna retold the story of insurance numbers and made themselves the righteous protagonists.
At the same time, it is important not to overstate the emancipatory potential of such retellings. Meeting hegemonic structures ‘on their own terms’ compels people like Satish and Ganesh to voice their demands in an arena most familiar to those they are trying to oppose. Members of Shetkari Sangathna were able to effectively politicise the technomoral governance of crop insurance and their practices of calculation by insisting on the objectivist underpinnings of the scheme. Still, both insurance agents and state officials have been able to employ bureaucratic strategies to subvert and obstruct the efforts of Shetkari Sangathna to find out how the numbers that governed their livelihoods were produced. Operating from a position of power, they were able to dismiss and confuse, hide behind the inaccessible language of numbers and to place blame on individual technicalities. By meeting the insurance company on these technocratic terms, members of Shetkari Sangathna unwittingly embedded themselves into exactly the hierarchies that this system of governance produces. It seems that in this case technomoral politics promote authoritarian forms of governance, as they marshal all discussions in a language where those in power are most comfortable, precluding more fundamental critiques from taking shape (see also Shore and Wright 2015: 5).
Such reflections on what is excluded from the discussion also begs the question who is precluded. In this regard Sherry Ortner (1995) warns against sanitising politics. She argues that romanticising resistance as a ‘merely reactive’ consequence of domination fails to do justice to the complex relationships inherent to power and its contestation. Rather, she contends that we must look at acts of resistance as emerging from the ‘intricate webs of articulation and disarticulation that always exist between dominant and dominated’ (1995: 190). As we have seen, Eckert (2006, 2012) is similarly direct in positing that co-optation of the law into acts of resistance re-enforces the status quo and furthers state hegemony. However to Eckert, ‘vernacularisation of the law’ is not devoid of agency, with people manoeuvring in reference to legal frameworks and doing so from their personal positionalities (2012: 162–163). Moving further along these lines, Sharma (2013) argues that those people who lack the resources or knowledge to speak the language of, and participate in, these arenas have to rely on intermediaries or, worse still, be excluded from these discussions altogether (2013: 316). Again, Satish and Ganesh are a case in point. They had to learn the language, the infrastructure and the technicalities of the insurance scheme in order to participate in this political arena. They were able to do this because of their relatively privileged position as higher caste, wealthy, well-connected farmers. While they were not knowledgeable on the technocratic aspects of the scheme, they were able to call in the help of those who were. Even then, the availability of information, bureaucratic power and technological expertise remained asymmetrically distributed. Arguably this is why ‘we just want to know how it was calculated’ became such a powerful rallying cry. Its elegant comprehensibility and astuteness at least partially flattens the knowledge asymmetries to participate in this political arena. Technomoral governance has thus shifted the terms of the debate and has introduced new dynamics to political claim-making, dynamics that simultaneously pose new opportunities and challenges that have only recently emerged in ethnographic work.
Notes
https://scroll.in/article/914641/why-farmers-across-india-are-complaining-of-being-cheated-by-prime-ministers-crop-insurance-scheme (accessed 10 October 2022).
All names of people and places are pseudonyms.
https://nha.gov.in/PM-JAY (accessed 11 October 2022).
https://www.india.gov.in/spotlight/atal-pension-yojana (accessed 11 October 2022).
https://dahd.nic.in/related-links/livestock-insurance (accessed 11 October 2022).
The word ‘panacea’ was particularly noticeable during the introduction of PMFBY, but continues to be repeated in more recent government sources. See for instance: https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/madhya-pradesh/crop-insurance-scheme-is-panacea-for-farmers-modi/articleshow/51051982.cms and https://www.niti.gov.in/strengthening-indian-agriculture-ecosystem (accessed: 19 November 2024).
In the case of PMFBY, arguably this unequal distribution of risk is felt most strongly among those already in the most precarious position. As discussed below, PMFBY operates on the basis of a yield index which means that the insurance policy is tied to ownership of the land, rather than the person working it. As insurance is fundamentally about restoring and maintaining the status quo, it is worth considering the effects on existing social and caste inequalities.
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/shetkari-sanghatana-founder-sharad-joshi-passes-awayshetkari-sanghatana-founder-sharad-joshi-passes-away/article7981677.ece (accessed 7 October 2022).
This term is often used in policy circles and pubic voices. For instance, see: https://www.thebanker.com/India-pilots-self-regulation-for-fintechs-1709800409 (accessed 27 March 2024).
Unless stated otherwise, the quotes and conversations presented in this article are the product of interpretation between Nikhil and myself. Any mistakes in interpretation are mine alone.
This is called an area approach. It assumes a correlation between the yield of individual farmers and the average yield calculated on the basis of a number of sample cuttings. The reason for this assumption is that the types of climatic risks that crop insurance protects against are seen as ‘covariant’. This means that they are imagined to strike many individuals in the same way at the same time.
An image obtained by the author through social media shows a number of men throwing white plastic chairs in a government office with broken white plastic chairs piled up on the floor.
A letter directed at the Collector dated 10 July 2018 notes that at least six farmers were engaged in a hunger strike at that point. In the letter they vow to continue this strike until their deaths, adding ominously that ‘if anything happens to them you [the Collector] will be responsible’.
I failed to inform who and under which circumstances people received this money. The documents do include a letter, dated 6 August 2018, directed at the Collector complaining that while ₹5249 was disbursed, this was on the basis of old data which they wanted to see rectified. Also, only a small number of farmers from Satpur itself were reimbursed, while surrounding villages did not receive anything. It was a significant enough group, however, to have the collective effect of whittling down the cohesion of the protests.
References
Adams, V. (ed.) 2016. Metrics: what counts in global health. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Bähre, E. 2020. Ironies of solidarity: insurance and financialization of kinship in South Africa. London: Zed Books.
Ballestero, A. 2012. ‘Transparency short-circuited: laughter and numbers in Costa Rican water politics’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 35: 223–241.
Bornstein, E. and A. Sharma 2016. ‘The righteous and the rightful: the technomoral politics of NGOs, social movements, and the state in India’, American Ethnologist 43: 76–90.
Da Costa, D. 2013. ‘The “rule of experts” in making a dynamic micro-insurance industry in India’, Journal of Peasant Studies 40: 845–865.
Echterhölter, A. 2017. ‘Injury and measurement: Jacob Grimm on blood money and concrete quantification’, Social Analysis 61: 31–48.
Eckert, J. 2006. ‘From subjects to citizens: legalism from below and the homogenisation of the legal sphere’, The Journal of Legal Pluralism and Unofficial Law 38: 45–75.
Eckert, J. 2012. ‘Rumours of rights’, Ethnographic Forays into Law's Transformations, January.
Ewald, F. 2002. The return of Descartes’ malicious demon: an outline of a philosophy of precaution, in T. Baker and J. Simon (eds.), Embracing risk: the changing culture of insurance and responsibility, 273–302. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Ferguson, J. 1994. The anti-politics machine. The ecologist. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
Isakson, S. R. 2015. ‘Derivatives for development? Small-farmer vulnerability and the financialization of climate risk management’, Journal of Agrarian Change 15: 569–580.
Johnson, L. 2021. ‘Paying ex gratia: parametric insurance after calculative devices fail’, Geoforum 125: 120–131.
Kar, S. 2013. ‘Recovering debts: microfinance loan officers and the work of “proxy-creditors” in India’, American Ethnologist 40: 480–493.
Kimura, A. H. 2019. ‘Citizen science in post-Fukushima Japan: the gendered scientization of radiation measurement’, Science as Culture 28: 327–350.
Li, F. 2015. Unearthing conflict: corporate mining, activism, and expertise in Peru. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Merry, S. E. 2011. ‘Measuring the world’, Current Anthropology 52: S83–S95.
Ortner, S. B. 1995. ‘Resistance and the problem of ethnographic refusal’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 37: 173–193.
Rai, R. 2019. ‘Pradhan Mantri Fasal Bima Yojna: an assessment of India's crop insurance scheme’, ORF Issue Brief, no. 296: 1–13.
Reddy, D. N. and S. Mishra 2012. Agrarian crisis in India. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ross, S., M. Schmidt and V. Koskinen 2017. ‘Introduction: Overcoming the quantity–quality divide in economic anthropology’, Social Analysis 61: 1–16.
Sharma, A. 2013. ‘State transparency after the neoliberal turn: the politics, limits, and paradoxes of India's Right to Information Law’, PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 36: 308–325.
Shiva, V. and J. Kunwar 2010. ‘Seeds of suicide : the ecological and human costs of seed monopolies and globalisation of agriculture’, GUERNICA a Magazine for Art & Politics, 308.
Shore, C. and S. Wright 2015. ‘Governing by numbers: audit culture, rankings and the new world order’, Social Anthropology 23: 22–28.
Taylor, M. 2016. Risky ventures: financial inclusion, risk management and the uncertain rise of index-based insurance, in S. Soederberg (ed.), Risking capitalism, 237–266. Bingley: Emerald.
Ticktin, M. I. 2011. Casualties of care: immigration and the politics of humanitarianism in France. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Walker, K. Le Mons 2008. ‘Neoliberalism on the ground in rural India: predatory growth, agrarian crisis, internal colonization, and the intensification of class struggle’, Journal of Peasant Studies 35: 557–620.
Wendland, C. 2016. Estimating death: a close reading of maternal morality metrics in Malawi, in V. Adams (ed.), Metrics: what counts in global health, 57–81. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.