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Put millets back on the plate by Biraj Patnaik


One of the key demands of the Right to Food Campaign for the National Food Security Act is to re-introduce nutritious millets to government food programmes like the public distribution system. Millets like bajra, jowar, kodo, kutki and ragi among hundreds of other varieties have sustained communities for close to 10,000 years in India. Yet, they have been marginalized as food crops since the days of the Green Revolution in the 1960s when technological improvements in wheat and to a lesser extent in rice allowed for dramatic increases in their productivity, especially with the use of fertilizers and pesticides. The Indian agricultural establishment pushed for the large-scale adoption of these two cereals as staple diets.

A wide range of policy incentives and a slew of financial subsidies, backed by the agricultural extension machinery of the government managed in just three decades to push back both the cultivation and consumption of nutritious millets. India now produces only about 40 million tonnes of nutritious millets annually from a few areas, with a dramatic decline in the cropped area under millets as compared to wheat and rice.

Yet nutritious millets are now poised to make a major comeback for many reasons.

First, due to their higher nutritional content, for the most part, vis-à-vis rice or wheat. Second, the excessive use of fertilizers and pesticides for green revolution crops have led to extensive damage to soils and to the health of farmers using them. The unquestioning enthusiasm of mainstream agricultural scientists has therefore given way to many voices which question the further spread of input-intensive agriculture. Third, the debate on climate change has reversed the productivity debate. It is now well acknowledged that how we grow our food is as important as how much food we grow. Millets grow in the harshest environments, with little inputs of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. In that sense, they have been rightly described as “miracle foods”. Fourth, they allow for much more diversity than dependence on two main crops for our cereal requirements. Fifth, the green revolution has left untouched the drylands of India, where most of the small and marginal farmers practise subsistence agriculture.

Small and marginal farmers in dryland areas have little access to irrigation and depend mostly on the monsoons. Millets, which are more drought-resistant and have a wide range of area-specific varieties, developed over centuries by farmers, offer a far greater chance of survival in a drought year than rice or wheat. Lastly, the nutritional value of millets has now been recognized by the urban elite and this humble “survival food” of the poor has begun appearing in supermarkets as a fashionable alternative to packaged breakfast cereals.

The policy choices that we have to make as a nation, both on the production and consumption side, should therefore reflect these changing dynamics.

For starters, on the consumption side, millets should be actively encouraged in government sponsored supplementary feeding programmes like the mid-day meal scheme and ICDS. Over time, the public distribution system could similarly provide subsidized millets in addition to rice and wheat. Simultaneously, greater incentives have to be offered to farmers, beginning with those in dryland areas, to switch back to millet production. These incentives should include remunerative minimum support prices, agricultural extension services and support in promoting appropriate varieties.

We would also need to reverse the increasingly perverse trend, pioneered by States like Maharashtra, which are providing large subsidies to the liquor industry to use millets for producing liquor at the cost of food security.