“Skill India” is a large-scale initiative to upgrade India's skill development capacity across various sectors, including agriculture. One criticism of the initiative is that, in practice, its training programs serve to “deskill India” by supplanting workers’ active, embodied, and responsive (i.e. skillful) modes of engaging with their local environment with subservience to expert knowledge. Through a focus on the agricultural trainings introduced under “Skill India,” this paper shows that while in some ways this kind of “deskilling” of farmers is evident, in other ways, trainings introduced new skills or refined/modified existing skills. The Marxist notions of alienation, subsumption, and hegemony are argued to have more analytical value in interpreting what these programs do to skills. Skills are alienated from the social relations that have historically given them meaning; they are subsumed to the interests of capital and are hegemonized, in the sense that farmers’ are encouraged to accept a conception of “skill” that aligns with corporate interests. This, however, is not a complete process: other understandings of skill persist as the hegemony of capital over the agri-skills field is not complete. The notions of subsumption, alienation, hegemony, and resistance may bring nuance to broader debates on agricultural “deskilling.” © The Author(s) 2025.
Author Keywords
Index Keywords
