2 ideas
Indian textile production was spread across millions of households and villages, linking local growers, spinners, dyers, and weavers in short supply chains close to the fibre. This structure spread employment and income widely and needed little capital. Centralized mill production concentrated those gains and cut the local links.
Bt cotton hybrids, approved in India in 2002 through Mahyco-Monsanto, were promoted as bollworm protection but required buying seed each season plus costly fertilizer, pesticides for other pests, and ideally irrigation. On rainfed land in regions like Vidarbha, erratic rains and crop failures added to input debt, and pink bollworm later developed resistance. The authors present this as worsening an agrarian distress and farmer suicide crisis already present in the 1990s, not as its origin.