Data-Driven Capabilities, Multi-Tier Supply Chain Transparency, and Sustainable Performance in Indian Agro-Processing: An Organizational Information Processing Perspective under Climate and Institutional Heterogeneity

Abstract

Agro-processing firms in India occupy an uncomfortable position. They sit between a fragmented smallholder base on one side and increasingly demanding retail, export, and regulatory regimes on the other, and they are expected to deliver sustainability outcomes while coping with monsoon volatility, heat stress, and highly uneven institutional environments across states. Whether data-driven supply chain management capabilities help these firms, and through what mechanism, remains poorly understood. Most existing work draws on samples from more consolidated supply chain structures where transparency can be treated as a dyadic phenomenon between a focal processor and a small set of direct suppliers. The Indian setting violates that assumption at a structural level. This study develops and tests an organizational information processing framework that reformulates supply chain transparency as a multi-tier construct spanning direct suppliers, sub-tier intermediaries, and farm-level traceability, while treating information processing requirements as a measurable variable tied to climate exposure, supplier fragmentation, and regulatory density. Primary survey data from 307 Indian agro-processing firms across dairy, horticulture, tea and spices, aquaculture, and grain and pulse processing were collected and stratified across four state clusters representing distinct institutional regimes. The data were merged with district-level climate records from the India Meteorological Department and state-level agricultural reform indicators. Structural equation modeling, polynomial response surface analysis, and conditional indirect effect estimation were used to test the framework, with Gaussian copula correction and instrumental specifications supporting the robustness of the results. The findings show that data-driven capabilities raise sustainable performance, but with a reach that attenuates sharply beyond the first tier and that this attenuation narrows where institutional infrastructure is stronger and where circular economy orientation is embedded in formal sustainability schemes rather than held as a loose managerial preference. Climate exposure amplifies the marginal value of digital capability, which means firms sourcing from high-volatility districts extract disproportionately more benefit from investment in data infrastructure. The paper contributes a climate- and institution-contingent extension of organizational information processing theory, a tiered reconceptualization of supply chain transparency that reshapes how digital capabilities are understood to accomplish in fragmented chains, and a configuration-specific set of policy and managerial implications relevant to Indian agro-processing, state agricultural departments, and central schemes that target sustainability in the agri-food system.