Millet farmers in Kandhamal district

Bhubaneswar, Nov. 6: Oats, muesli, granola, and how about some millets to jump-start your day?

A team of researchers and social scientists here are trying to get the humble millet into urban kitchens. This power-packed food crop, which is facing an extinction of sorts, is now being revived in select villages of Odisha.

“There has been a rising popularity of millets as a highly nutritious food crop among the health conscious, especially in western countries. Perturbed by environmental and health concerns, more and more people are showing interest towards locally grown produce,” said Baburam Singh, in-charge of the Intellectual Property Rights cell at the Odisha University of Agriculture Technology (OUAT).

Besides their nutritional value, millets are drought-resistant, consume low amounts of natural resources such as water and soil nutrients as compared to other cereals and are resilient to climate changes,” said professor of agronomy A.K. Behuria of OUAT, adding that at least 15 new varieties of millets have been introduced by the university that has been working on the crops since 1979.

Ironically, however, over the years, these crop areas have been declining due to state agriculture policy that promotes paddy and few other crops ignoring the multiple benefits of millets, said social scientist Prasant Mohanty, who started the project among farmers of the Kutia Kondh community of Kandhamal district.

“The tribal community has an age-old experience in mixed farming and were already growing millets 20 to 25 years ago. However, with massive government promotion through green revolution for paddy cultivation and rice dominating the public distribution system, millets had slowly started vanishing,” said Mohanty.

As many as 14 villages covering 306 households of Gumma gram panchayat of Tumudibandha block of the district were targeted. Millet seed banks were formed, farmers trained by agri-experts and 25 crop varieties successfully revived.

Besides aiming to up-scale the project to 10 more villages this year, the team also plans to find out ways for value addition and proper market linkage for popularising millets.

“We are also making efforts to convince the state government to include millets in the mid-day meal scheme and anganwadis and are also seriously working on getting an organic certification that will enable a better market linkage for the crop,” Mohanty said.