Millet might

Odisha's mission to bring millets back to its fields and plates can succeed with greater marketing support and promotion beyond tribal areas

- ANAMIKA YADAV

SUPPLY creates its own demand. This theory, believed to have been proposed by the early 19th-century French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, may sound like a foolhardy view to the modern ear, but this is how India lost the diversity of its food basket to Green Revolution. In the 1960s, as the country was struggling to feed itself, the focus was to rapidly increase the production of two crops-wheat and rice. This shaped an Indian diet where rice and wheat became the staple food, eventually reducing the demand for other traditional cereal grains like millets. Assessments in recent decades show that while the Green Revolution has not helped address the nutritional security of India, it has turned the country into the world's biggest extractor of groundwater. Heavy reliance on chemical inputs has degraded soil, polluted water sources and is harming farmers' health.

Fifty years later, as Odisha tries to improve nutritional security and promote sustainable agricultural practices, Say's law has come in handy. In 2017, the state launched the Odisha Millet Mission (OMM), which aims to bring millets back to its fields and food plates by encouraging farmers to grow the crops that traditionally formed a substantial part of the diet and crop system in tribal areas. This highly varied group of small-seeded cereal crops not only require less water, farm inputs and are more resilient to climate vulnerability, but rich in nutrients like calcium, iron and protein (see 'Better for the food plate').