Prakash Kumar is an associate professor of history and Asian studies at Pennsylvania State University. His scholarship interrogates the nature of development and modernization in agricultural and rural societies on the one hand and in domains of diseases on the other hand. He examines these themes in the colonial and post-colonial history of India and in the dynamics of a US-dominated global order in the twentieth century.  India embraced the key technology of high-yielding variety seeds (or HYVs) of wheat and paddy in the 1960s to tide over food scarcity and yet ambivalences towards such agrarian transitions to productivity have remained.

Deviating from the historiography that praises the HYV expansion in terms of a diplomatic Marshall Plan or a technological magic bullet, Kumar's talk beckons attention to the history of past efforts at raising agrarian productivity that paved the path to the green revolution and was folded into its history and its present. As the green revolution carved its place in technocratic celebrations of pulling India out of food scarcity, the prior history of efforts to improve yield, the alternate beliefs in reforms and community participation, and of colonial era developments were forgotten. He argues that colonial legacies and a 20th-century history of post-independence reconstruction were rolled into this momentous agrarian transformation. This contingent history of India’s HYV agriculture is often hidden by a dominant technocratic perspective that speaks of moments, magical silver bullets, and the wondrous efficacy of steps taken by a postcolonial bureaucracy.