Visioning Indian Agro-Urbanism

Abstract

The 21st century presents India with an unprecedented convergence of crises: a growing population projected to reach 1.515 billion by 2030 (United Nations Population Fund, 2025), accelerating urbanisation encroaching upon productive rural landscapes, and a food system caught between ecological exhaustion and deepening spatial inequality. India's double burden of malnutrition and obesity, distributed asymmetrically between rural and urban populations (Dutta et al., 2019), is not merely a nutritional challenge but a territorial one, embedded in the infrastructure, governance, and political economy of the agricultural system. Historical ratchets, from the Green Revolution's ecological hatchets of soil salinisation and groundwater depletion (Aditya et al., 2020) to the emerging Agriculture 4.0 trajectory of precision farming and drone-based agriculture (Barman et al., 2025), risk reproducing structural inequities unless decoupled from questions of access, justice, and place-based ecological knowledge. This project, thus, examines how India's food production system can achieve resilience in a just manner, improving agricultural productivity to meet nutritional security, while simultaneously ensuring the livelihoods of producers and the ecological balance of the landscapes that sustain them.

This project focuses on the tri-state region of Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh, and Maharashtra, linked by the Narmada and Tapi river systems and a transboundary basalt aquifer as an exemplary agro-climatic territory where these overlapping crises manifest. The region's agricultural significance, shaped by large-scale hydrological infrastructure, the Sardar Sarovar Project, reveals how technocratic water governance simultaneously enables production and produces territorial inequalities in which surplus and scarcity coexist.

This project employs critical and narrative cartography, multi-criteria decision analysis, geospatial synthesis, and scenario mapping as tools to classify agricultural landscape typologies across the study region and evaluate their biophysical feasibility, governance constraints, and socio-ecological vulnerabilities. Four scenarios, developed along axes of scale and technology, are evaluated against criteria of producer justice, ecological balance, food sovereignty, and systemic resilience.

The project concludes that India's agricultural crisis demands a decisive departure from siloed technological and economic interventions toward integrated, justice-oriented spatial strategies. The proposed Indian Agro-Urbanism Operational Framework, tested through Surat district, repositions agriculture as an urbanisation issue, embedding agro-climatic zone-based planning, participatory governance, and ecological balance into territorial planning. Investment in adaptive, resilient public and commons infrastructure is indispensable for navigating the Ratchet–Hatchet–Pivot cycle (DeFries, 2014) justly, providing conservation grounds, experimental testing spaces, and deployment commons accessible to farmers, consumers, and ecosystems alike, rather than captured by private capital. Reinstating agro-climatic zone differentiation provides a scientifically grounded basis for cropping strategies and resource allocation. Ultimately, achieving just and resilient food production requires abandoning the dichotomy between conventional and automated farming, rural and urban, and production and ecology, co-producing the spatial imaginaries that India's food system crisis urgently demands.