Tasks for India’s millet revolution Premium

There are lessons from Tamil Nadu to help make millet cultivation profitable

The Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) has declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets. Millets have special nutritive properties (they are high in protein, dietary fibre, micronutrients and antioxidants) and special agronomic characteristics (drought-resistant and suitable for semi-arid regions). If millets are good for nutrition and are climate-resilient, what then are the constraints to increased millet cultivation and consumption?

I provide a brief outline of the economics of millet cultivation (its production, consumption and procurement), followed by some lessons from the experience of the M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) in conserving millet biodiversity and promoting the production and consumption of millets in the Kolli hills, Tamil Nadu, a model that can be adapted to other areas. In writing this article, the inputs of Oliver King and D.J. Nithya of the MSSRF have been valuable.

Two groups of millets are grown in India. Major millets include sorghum, pearl millet and finger millet, while minor millets include foxtail, little millet, kodo, proso, and barnyard millet.

In 2019-20, the total offtake of cereals through the Public Distribution System (PDS) and the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) and also school meals was around 54 million tonnes. If about 20% of rice and wheat were to be replaced by millet, the state would have to procure 10.8 million tonnes of millet.

In 2019-20, the total production of nutri-cereals (earlier called coarse cereals) was 47.7 million tonnes. The bulk of this was maize (28.8 million tonnes), a non-millet crop used mainly as feed (M.S. Swaminathan had suggested that coarse cereals be replaced by nutri-cereals). The production of sorghum (4.8 million tonnes), pearl millet (10.4 million tonnes), and finger millet along with other millets (3.7 million tonnes) put together was 18.9 million tonnes. With this production, the inclusion of millets in the PDS would only be feasible if more than 50% production were procured — an unlikely scenario. Currently, millets are procured in only a few States, and stocks in the central pool are small. In May 2022, central stocks had 33 million tonnes of rice and 31 million tonnes of wheat, but only four lakh tonnes of nutricereals.

The real problems are: first, the decline in the area under millet cultivation, and, second, the low productivity of millets. Over the last decade, the production of sorghum (jowar) has fallen,the production of pearl millet (bajra) has stagnated,and the production of other millets, including finger millet (ragi), has stagnated or declined. The productivity of jowar and bajra has increased, but only marginally. The average yield of jowar was 957 kg per hectare in 2011-12 and 989 kg per hectare in 2019-20. The yield of bajra was 1,079 kg per ha in 2010-11 and 1,237 kg per ha in 2017-18.

Unless productivity and production are increased substantially, all exhortations to consume millets will come to naught.