Agricultural skill development in neoliberal contexts: Upskilling, deskilling, or skills’ subsumption?

Abstract

“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 h..