Living Knowledge Systems Dialogue, 24–25 August 2026, Organised by the Centre for Sustainable Agriculture (CSA), Hyderabad
I spent two wonderful days in this Living Knowledge Systems Dialogue which brought together more than 30 participants, including younger research staff from CSA, practitioners, facilitators, field-level workers, and participants from academic and corporate institutions. What CSA is attempting to do is a very critical gap in terms of creating process for the adaption of the people’s knowledge within the mainstream. It is a difficult space to navigate both conceptually and operationally and it is commendable that Dr. Ramanjuneyulu (Ramoo) and his young research team lead by the cheerful Ms. Vinyasa (Vibubhai) have taken up this difficult task. The challenge is not restricted to the gap they are trying to bridge, it is also with the process they have chosen to do so, taking a consultative 
route to validate the tools that they have developed and having practitioners with real time examples to contribute towards fine-tuning the tool is not an easy job. Even the most radical amongst us seem to be most comfortable to move from abstract to the practice rather than practice to the abstract. This became visible during the workshop. More of my reflections at the end of this article, first for a short report on the insights from the workshop itself.
I like the fact that Vinubhai starts every event with a poem. This itself is a change from the normal tech-process gathering where we either start with an unceremonious welcome address or a insipid prayer played out. She creates a new poem for each event and she had one for this one too.
The workshop began with a brief self-introduction exercise led by Vinubhai, in which participants shared their name, institution, profession, and the profession they might have chosen if they had not pursued their present work. Interestingly, a majority said they would have chosen music or playing an instrument.
CSA's Work
CSA has already collected around 7,000 agricultural practices from secondary sources, of which approximately 4,000 have been catalogued. These practices are organised into 19 categories and come from specific regions across 13 Indian states. Of these, 83 practices have so far been curated in greater detail, including 43 plant-based practices.
The broader goal is to establish a practical, ethical, and scalable system for collecting field-evolved agricultural practices, understanding their scientific rationale and boundary conditions, and communicating them through audience-specific content and media without losing their context, ownership, or uncertainty.
The workshop sought to:
- Develop a shared definition and workflow for Living Knowledge Systems that includes both traditional practices and contemporary farmer innovations.
- Test and refine a Living Knowledge Record (LKR) capturing the practice, its provenance, adaptations, resources, local evidence, variants, and conditions of success or failure.
- Develop a Curation and Boundary Conditions Sheet documenting rationale, evidence, comparisons, risks, limitations, contextual variables, and generalisability.
- Develop an Audience Treatment Matrix for farmers, field workers and trainers, researchers, and programme managers, covering content depth, language, media, customisation, and safeguards.
- Integrate ethics, intellectual property, prior informed consent, attribution, and benefit-sharing into collection, curation, and dissemination.
- Develop a scaling roadmap with institutional roles, priority domains, indicators, milestones, and named responsibilities.
Problem: Institutional Knowledge versus Practiced Knowledge
A central concern emerging from CSA's experience is that many attempts to scale agricultural practices fail not because the practice itself is inadequate, but because the knowledge of the practice is poorly communicated and contextualised.
CSA has found it useful to distinguish between institutional knowledge and practiced knowledge.
Institutional knowledge generally moves through the academic–research–university–extension–practice pathway. It tends to be prescriptive and designed for mainstream outreach.
Practiced knowledge, in contrast, is locally evolved. Farmers learn, adapt, test, and refine it through actual practice.
A major difficulty lies in the language gap between these two systems. The language and conceptual framework used by mainstream agricultural outreach often do not correspond to the way practitioners understand, evaluate, and adopt practices.
Financial and institutional systems also tend to be designed around mainstream agriculture. For example, insurance and other risk-management structures may not recognise what farmers actually do in the field, thereby excluding locally evolved practices from available benefits and protections.
Context is Central to Agricultural Knowledge
Many agricultural practices are highly location specific. Their effectiveness depends on local ecological, climatic, social, economic, and cultural conditions. Consequently, simply “scaling up” a practice without understanding its context can make the practice ineffective or inappropriate.
The dominant institutional approach often favours standardised, one-size-fits-all solutions. In contrast, locally developed practices require contextualisation.
There is considerable potential for horizontal scaling of farmer-developed practices, but this depends on communicating them in ways that other farmers can understand and use. Communication confined to abstract scientific explanations may not enable adoption.
This creates a continuing tension between what is prescribed from above and what is practical in the field. Even advocates of natural farming can sometimes fall into the trap of preaching specific ecological practices rather than addressing the specific problems farmers face.
The important question is therefore not simply whether a practice “works”, but:
- Is there a rationale for the practice that can be communicated?
- What specific problem does it address?
- How does it address that problem?
Among existing practices, an important distinction is also made between inherited practices and innovations developed by identifiable farmers.
Innovation, Context and Change
A recurring observation was that innovation happens with practitioners, but much of the knowledge disappears when it becomes institutionalised.
The element most often lost is context, even though context may be the most important part of the knowledge.
A major area of farmer innovation concerns rising input costs. Farmers frequently develop substitution practices, replacing expensive inputs with locally available, accessible, and lower-cost alternatives.
Practices can also be interpreted through ideological frameworks—for example, debates around cow versus buffalo or native versus cross-bred animals—which can obscure the practical reasons behind particular choices.
Farmer practices are also influenced by wider changes, including:
- climate change
- market forces
- regulations and
- changing input costs.
Problems with Extension and Knowledge Communication
The workshop identified a serious context problem within agricultural extension.
The feedback loop between farmers and extension systems is weak. As a result, there can be a significant gap between what an extension officer understands and what the officer is required to prescribe.
Extension is often reduced to information transfer rather than knowledge and skill transfer. I have earlier written on one of the biggest bottlenecks of the extension bureaucracy – the point of aggregation and the point of accountability cannot be the same.
There is also a concern about the use of AI and other technologies. While such technologies may have some advantages, they operate according to their own rules and logic and are not necessarily curated to reflect local knowledge conditions (I have written at length about the prevalent agri-tech bureaucratic mindset here).
Another problem is the speed at which knowledge now travels. Practices can move rapidly from identification to haphazard adoption and imminent failure and eventual rejection, leaving insufficient time to observe failures, learn from them, and allow the practice to evolve.
In Government outreach system often the person who is accountable to deliver a programme (including the data of success) is the same person aggregating the numbers in the field - this I have pointed out several times earlier as a real problem. In one of the government agriculture projects that I had reviewed a couple of years ago, one key question I kept repeating for which the agriculture department could not respond with any certainty was on the number of people who adopt any practice that is introduced from the outreach. The relationship between Piloting an innovative practice – to how many people are adapting these – to what is sustained over a period of time, could never be clearly established by them. Their piloting was fully funded and that is what they are used to counting for the accounting purpose. The visitors to the pilot field was often mistakenly presented as “adaption” as it had a large number. How many of them actually “sustained” after such adaption was conveniently left out.
CSA's emerging response based on their own insights have been designed is a four-stage process: Collect → Curate → Customize → Communicate.
A Nuanced Classification of Practices
CSA has begun categorising practices according to the degree of knowledge and evidence available:
- Established practices
- Explained practices
- Not yet explained practices
- Practices with unresolved questions that should not therefore be dismissed
The last category is particularly important. Lack of a complete explanation should not automatically be treated as evidence that a practice is invalid. Earlier this year, Dr AV Balasubramaniam of Centre for Indian Knowledge Systems (CIKS) had told me during a conversation that the “absence of evidence for efficacy is not the same as evidence for absence of efficacy”!
The workshop also stressed that failure is itself a source of knowledge. At present, when a locally developed agricultural practice fails, the experience is often discarded rather than documented and used to improve the practice. This prevents natural farming and other practitioner-led knowledge systems from learning systematically from experimentation.
Difficult Questions of Knowledge and Practice
Several examples were discussed to expose tensions between different knowledge systems.
The first concerned iodine-enriched salt. The discussion questioned whether mandatory iodine enrichment is ustified at all by the rationale of addressing iodine deficiency, particularly given the fact that by nature iodine sublimates, and all benefits can be lost during cooking and boiling. The example was used to raise a broader question about how scientific rationale, regulation, and actual conditions.
The second concerned the Sun. In many Indian farming traditions, the Sun is understood as a deity, whereas modern scientific education describes it as a star or celestial body. Simply replacing one description with another may satisfy the dominant knowledge paradigm without necessarily addressing the practical problem involved.
These examples point to a broader issue: different knowledge systems may ask different questions and organise experience differently. Translation between them cannot be reduced to replacing one vocabulary with another.
Scaling, Curation and Institutional Design
Several institutional principles emerged from the discussion.
A repository of practices is not necessarily a representation of all followers or practitioners. The practices that get documented may not represent the full diversity of practice.
Similarly, curators are not reviewers. Curation should document, organise, contextualise, and make knowledge legible; it should not automatically be equated with scientific peer review.
The need to teach practitioners to theorise their own practices was also highlighted. Farmers and practitioners should be supported to articulate the reasoning, observations, conditions, adaptations, and limits underlying what they do.
Scaling must therefore be understood not simply as increasing numbers, but as building an interdependent ecosystem involving practitioners, researchers, trainers, communicators, markets, institutions, and regulatory systems.
Ethics, Ownership and Open Knowledge
Ethics as I have often written about, is the core of any Indian knowledge transfer process. It was good to see that the CSA team as well had this clearly articulated, they had mentioned the need to build ethical dimension into the entire knowledge process rather than added after collection.
Transparent processes should include:
- publication and documentation, including biodiversity registers;
- acknowledgement of individual practitioners and communities;
- prior informed consent;
- attribution; and
- benefit-sharing.
The workshop also emphasized treating this knowledge as an open-source knowledge commons rather than relying primarily on exclusive rights frameworks. In this context, the assumption that patents are the only effective way of protecting practitioners from exploitation was explicitly challenged as well. This goes with my own observations and conviction that at least in India, we should keep the lokavidya or people’s knowledge as open-source rather than get into proprietorial space.
Experiences of Practitioner-Innovators
The experiences shared by practitioner-innovators illustrated the gap between innovation, recognition, and adoption.
Krishnudu (Thulasi Botanicals) described pressure of scaling, challenges of unlicensed marketing, and the need to use market channels and packaging familiar to farmers. Although he personally does not favour plastic bottles, he is forced to adopt them as such packaging is demanded for market acceptance.
Sabarinath (Shabari 555) highlighted difficulties in market communication and the problem of research systems being unable to explain why his practice works.
Narasimha Rao, who developed a herbal repellent for wild boar and other animals, faces licensing difficulties. The product has not yet been tested on monkeys. Even farmer-to-farmer sale creates difficulties. There is also an ethical dimension: some farmers do not want to repel animals because they believe the animals have nowhere else to go.
Chandrasekhar of Kalahasti, inventor of a permanent hair dye, has received patents and awards but continues to face major outreach and adoption problems. Venture capital and investment are unreliable; there can be considerable appreciation of innovations without corresponding adoption. He also highlighted substantial exploitation in the sector.
These experiences demonstrate that recognition, scientific explanation, intellectual property, regulation, market access, and actual adoption are separate problems and cannot be solved through a single mechanism.
Regulation and Unequal Standards
A significant concern was the unequal burden of proof placed on farmer-practitioners.
Practitioners are often required to prove their practices scientifically, while mainstream agricultural products and recommendations may operate with considerably weaker compliance.
The example raised was insecticide regulation: products are supposed to be registered for specific pests and crops, yet the workshop noted that a substantial proportion of products currently recommended in the market are neither registered nor regulated.
This raises questions about whose knowledge is subjected to scrutiny, whose claims are accepted as legitimate, and how regulatory standards are applied across different knowledge systems.
Emerging Opportunities
The proposal to establish 10,000 bio-resources centres across Andhra Pradesh was noted as an important potential institutional opportunity. Such such centres could potentially become part of a larger ecosystem for documenting, preserving, developing, and sharing local biological and agricultural knowledge, provided that they are designed around practitioner participation, contextual knowledge, ethical processes, and meaningful feedback.
My Reflection at the end of the workshop…
The workshop points towards a fundamental shift in how agricultural knowledge should be understood and communicated. The curation process that CSA proposes is an essential speed breaker in the knowledge highway where restrictive and expensive entry barrier for innovation (my previous article on Innovation has more details on the same) by practitioners exists, with high speed validation and eventual discarding, all through established tools and methods that have made themselves the norm.
Farmer knowledge is not information waiting to be validated by institutions. It is a living body of knowledge that is continually tested, adapted, and developed through practice. I liked the title ‘living knowledge’ as it establishes the operative nature of knowledge while escaping all the previous definitions from diverse time and space that entrap the practices into neat divisive categories. But I could'nt but wonder at the diverse terminologies we have often been forced to borrow to assert the knowledge of the majority of people in this country - from the early days when we called such knowledge as "indigenous" knowledge (in the 80s humanities), and "local knowledge", to "lokvidya" (Sunil Sahasrabuddhey, et al), to "traditional" knowledge, more currently to the "Indian" knowledge, etc., It is as though the Colonial legacy system prevails so pre-eminently through this period, that the farmer's knowledge needs to constantly learn and adorn new cloak of terminology merely to negotiate its place.
Many of these categories have had challenges of different kind in the Indian condition as the practice defies to be contained to satisfy the needs of a eager scholar. Farmers continuously learn, adapt newer practices from near and far and discard what is not relevant too. The Gandhian historian Dharampal in his paper of 1990, said "the new knowledge was married to the need with discrimination and if it worked it was allowed to modify itself according to the priorities and preferences of the borrower".
The central challenge is therefore not simply how to collect more practices, but how to preserve the context, reasoning, evidence, uncertainty, ownership, and conditions that makes a practice meaningful.
The larger lesson of the dialogue is that scaling living knowledge is not primarily a problem of transferring information. It is a problem of translation, context, relationships, learning, ethics, and institutional design. The current institutioal challenge of outreach is the primary challenge here and knowledge is but one of the several challenges that ought to be addressed in the way our systems are organized.
The proposed Collect → Curate → Customize → Communicate approach offers a practical foundation for addressing this institutional challenge, provided that the process remains grounded in the lived experience of practitioners and retains the uncertainty and contextual conditions that are part of the knowledge itself.
I do think that a deeper look at the knowledge discourse still needs to emerge from the ways of knowing as understood in the Indian context. But maybe I leave it for the next article in this series.