Fixing Rice Stubble Burning for Delhi's Air: Technological Solutionism and Agrarian Governance in Haryana

ABSTRACT Every winter, Delhi's polluted air draws national attention to the burning of rice stubble in neighbouring states. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Haryana in north India, this article shows how bureaucrats and scientists attempt to enact certainty around technological solutions to stubble burning even while privately acknowledging their ineffectiveness. They do so by ignoring inconsistencies, explaining failures as aberrations or making emotional appeals for adoption. This persistence reflects a broader logic of ‘technological solutionism,’ which reframes systemic challenges as narrow technical problems to reinforce existing power structures. In doing so, the article advances two key arguments. First, it shows how agricultural scientists increasingly invoke climate‐related uncertainty to explain the failure of technological solutions under field conditions. Second, it argues that the ineffectiveness of technological solutions leads to both scepticism among bureaucrats and the mobilisation of emotion and affect in response to farmers' pushback. Rather than producing a state‐led structural shift towards agroecological principles, even alternatives are incorporated within a solutionist register, ultimately reinforcing the dominant techno‐scientific paradigm. The article concludes with the reasons for the persistence of technological solutionism in agriculture.