Over the past two and a half decades, literature pertaining to Vidarbha region in central India largely focused on the story of agrarian distress manifested in the form of farmers’ suicides, as elaborated in the foregoing chapters. In this context, the predominantly rain-fed cotton tracts of Vidarbha appeared on the map of agrarian crisis primarily because of a spate of farmers’ suicides. Scholarly discourse and popular writing on the crisis in Indian agriculture has found neoliberal policies since the economic reforms of the early 1990s and the state's withdrawal from agriculture as a corollary of neoliberalism that centred on removing obstacles to free market capitalism, as the prime suspects for the grim situation. Rising cost of cultivation, falling profitability, growing indebtedness, susceptibility to market and natural forces, and general developmental backlogs are recurrent themes in analyses of economic distress of farmers. While this narrative describes the plight of farmers by emphasizing agrarian distress and farmers’ suicides, a mere focus on the grim realities of agrarian life, though necessary, misses out on three critical dimensions of life and livelihood of agricultural households central to the cotton economy.

First, in a production system that has been historically exposed to considerable risks owing to it being nested in interconnected systems of global demand and supply, contemporary discourse has focused on a time horizon that is confined to neoliberal policies and the post-colonial Indian state. Therefore, ascribing culpability to the state and broader economic paradigms although ideologically expedient owing to the proximity to what has transpired in recent times, lacks critical awareness of inveterate historical forces that have shaped institutions and political antecedents of the cotton economy of the region. True, there are several accounts of social distress attributed to neoliberal reforms in the Global South, namely in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. However, the evolution of institutions, state actions, and capitalist development are intertwined in a complex manner that makes it naive to simply infer that neoliberalism is the root cause of agrarian distress. Moreover, contrarian views on the opportunities created by neoliberalism also abound, a cross-examination of which is crucial for scholarly progress. Second, among the tales of tragedy unfolding in the region in the form of the agrarian crisis and farmers’ suicides, there are stories of upward mobility and optimism.