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India's Millets Makeover: Set To Reach Poor, School Meals -Charu Bahri
-IndiaSpend.com

So far, only a few states such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had made available millets and that too only in certain pockets.

The union government proposes to include coarse grains such as jowar (sorghum), bajra (pearl millet) and ragi (finger millet) in the mid-day meal programme in schools and also distribute it through the government subsidised food programme, the public distribution system (PDS), agriculture secretary SK Patnaik said recently.

This announcement comes five years after the introduction of the National Food Security Act, which provided for the distribution of millets, once a staple in the Indian diet. PDS beneficiaries, 813 million of India’s poorest people and roughly 75% of its rural population and 25% of its urban population, will get millets at Rs 1 per kg.

So far, only a few states such as Karnataka and Tamil Nadu had made available millets and that too only in certain pockets.

However, the government will give millets a makeover before making them available through the PDS. “Instead of distributing millets as a coarse grain, the government proposes to bracket it in a new ‘nutricereals’ category,” Vilas A Tonapi, director, Indian Institute of Millets Research, told IndiaSpend.

There is now growing awareness of the superior nutritional profile of millets compared to wheat and rice–the staples thus far distributed through the PDS and the food preference of consumers at large. Millets, because of their higher iron, calcium and overall mineral content to wheat and rice, hold the potential to help address India’s malnutrition problem, a fact IndiaSpend reported in August 2016.

More than half of India’s women and children, and one in five men are anaemic. Their loss of productivity shaved $22.64 billion (Rs 1.5 lakh crore) off India’s gross domestic product in 2016, more than three times the health budget for 2017-18, IndiaSpend reported in November 2017.

Malnutrition is also implicated in India’s growing tide of diabetes, we reported in December 2015. Diabetes is now affecting the urban poor as well as the affluent.

This renewed focus on millets may not be easy to achieve. India’s average annual millet production stood at 17.79 million tonnes between 2010-11 and 2014-15. This is less than a tenth of the 215 million tonnes of rice and wheat produced. Thus, large-scale procurement of millets presupposes a radical change in India’s cropping pattern.

“Yes, the government will encourage more farmers especially in rain-fed areas to grow the grain,” said Tonapi.

The revival of millets could benefit India’s floundering agriculture sector by boosting farm incomes and sustainable agriculture, as explained in later sections. It could also be a step towards sufficient food and nutrition in the eventuality of climate-change-triggered drought because millets are a hardier crop than wheat and rice, with some varieties growing well in areas more arid than western Rajasthan, India’s driest region.

Shift from millets to wheat, rice has cost India its health, environment

Making millets a significant part of the average Indian’s diet will involve reversing a food preference trend that can be traced back to half a century.

A staple till the 1960s, millets got pushed off the plate of the average Indian by wheat and rice, IndiaSpend reported in August 2016. By 2010, the average annual per capita consumption of sorghum and millets slid from 32.9 kg to 4.2 kg while the consumption of wheat almost doubled from 27 kg to 52 kg.

In rural India, this change was the obvious outcome of making wheat and paddy inexpensively available through the PDS, an initiative to alleviate malnutrition associated with low calorie intake.

“In 1965, food insecurity was so widespread that we actively promoted wheat and paddy to alleviate the situation,” Ashok Dalwai, chief executive officer, National Rainfed Area Authority, told IndiaSpend.

In urban India, the belief that wheat and rice are superior to millets was the biggest reason for this dietary evolution. Food convenience has also played a role. Wheat lends itself particularly well to the mechanised mass production of value-added products such as biscuits, cakes and noodles.

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