Indian agriculture is a core pillar of the Indian economy, embracing 45 per cent of the workforce and being the largest source of livelihood. Women comprise 33 per cent of the agriculture labour force and 48 per cent of the self-employed farmers in India.
If the majority of the food production is in the rural areas, then why is our population not consuming sufficient food quantity and dietary diversity.
Soil quality, too, plays a critical role in agriculture, health and nutrition and climate change. It stores more carbon than all the trees in the world and releases it into the atmosphere due to deforestation and contemporary agricultural practices.
The modern way of life is destroying the very habitat we very much depend on. Intensive farming contributes to the release of 30 per cent of all greenhouse gases and leads to top-soil erosion of 5.3 billion tonnes annually. It also is highly inequitable.
Chhattisgarh case
At this rate, we are not far from catastrophe and the response needs to be exponentially steep and intense. For thousands of years, we have lived in harmony with nature. Traditional food systems encompass all foods sourced from local natural resources.
They are characterised by minimal processing, small-scale operations, and low-tech, human-managed biophysical systems with short farm-to-plate value chains. Indigenous peoples, who constitute unique social and cultural groups with deep connections to their lands and surrounding natural resources, are often the sole guardians of traditional food systems and the ancestral ecological knowledge tied to them.
Over the past decade, indigenous foods have gained widespread global recognition for their potential to enhance food security while promoting biodiversity worldwide. Renowned for their high nutritional value, they hold significant promise in improving health and nutrition. The revival of millets in Chhattisgarh is a compelling case for this.
Millets are nutritionally rich, high in protein, vitamins, minerals, and particularly calcium—traditional drinks made from millets, such as ragi pech, sustained tribal communities during long foraging trips. Unlike cereals like rice and pulses, which can lead to micronutrient deficiencies, millets can help address malnutrition, especially in women and children.
Millets are also environmentally beneficial, requiring less water, being climate-resilient, and having low cultivation costs. In water-scarce regions like Chhattisgarh, promoting millet cultivation could improve food security and mitigate the adverse effects of climate change on agriculture.
With many efforts, the area under millets in Chhattisgarh has increased from 96,000 hectares to 1,60,000 hectares.
High energy costs
But to achieve breadth and depth in this, the challenges remain. The prime of them is the lack of mainstreaming of indigenous knowledge which is a unique understanding and repository of practices developed by people in a specific geographical area, shaped by their inter-generational behaviours and resource use within the complex ecological systems of their local environment.
There are many more by-products of this. One of them is drudgery mainly for women. The major farm operations mainly performed by farm women are cutting, picking, cleaning grains, drying grains, storage, processing, weeding, winnowing and so on.
Women subject their bodies to many stagnant, repetitive tasks that induce high stress, and unnatural postures leading to cardiovascular stress and musculoskeletal disorders. The strenuous exercise of pounding the grains after harvest is still prevalent among millet growers.
At times, millets are also laid out on the roads for vehicles to run them over for de-husking and avoiding drudgery. Simple technological units such as threshers are available but the energy costs remain high.
For instance, women in Chhattisgarh have aspired for solar threshers to address these challenges, but access to such low-cost subsidised tech solutions is still a challenge.
The second one is low productivity. Millet productivity remains on the lower side compared to other crops such as paddy and the core of this is the lack of availability of quality seeds.
The practice of seeds directly dispersed across the field, at times inadequate fertiliser application and weeding is avoided due to lack of access to tools. Millets, if not dried and stored properly, are prone to fungal decay. Post harvest, millets are still processed in a more traditional way such as pounding on bare ground with a log, which leads to a lot of impurities and food loss. This impacts the overall productivity and profitability of millets.
The third one is the information asymmetry. This gap is not just a lack of “right information at the right time” for just the farmers, buyers and sellers, it is a collapse of the traceability of the entire web of the value chain and the many stakeholders involved in it.
The rights and entitlements of farmers concerning millets are either not known fully or if at all known there are access issues or the processes are too complicated. The nutritional benefits are mostly known to Indigenous peoples, but as the major burden of poverty is shouldered by them, they depend on the Public Distribution System (PDS) which excludes millets, and hence are further away from millets.
Governments’ reach is often limited due to the complexities of administration, prioritisation, convergence and collaboration to encourage the production of millets.
Mapping indigenous knowledge
This case compels us to rethink and re-design what we grow, how we grow and why we grow food. To meet the urgency of climate change, gender issues and health and nutrition situations, there is a need to map indigenous knowledge with modern technologies.
This technological tweaking has to be rapidly recognised, packaged into accessible solutions and scaled up across various value chains for adopting more sustainable and regenerative practices.
There are financial institutions such as the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) trasntioing into a more Green role, that can support aggregating solutions such as solar threshers, drones and solar dryers through micro-finance, and governments can package them in a way that can be accessible to the communities and scale them through the State Rural Livelihood Mission (SRLM) and Department of Agriculture, that already have policies with scope of promoting this such as natural farming, organic farming and so on.
Special Central Assistance for Tribal Sub Plan also allows space for these community aspirations.
Community institutions can play a key role in dissemination and driving this effort on the ground through the expansion of payments for ecosystem services, such as soil carbon management and agrobiodiversity while enhancing extension services by facilitating better training, technology access, and seed availability.
Climate-smart technologies that use indigenous practices that are sensitive to income levels need to be pushed at the community level. Businesses and investors should transition from simply purchasing commodities to investing in sustainable value chains utilizing innovative financing methods to support underfunded segments of these value chains.
It is time to harness the digital revolution and digitisation of food and land use, as systems are advancing through gene-editing techniques, precision farming, and digital tools for logistics and marketing.
These innovations empower various stakeholders in the value chains to make more informed decisions and connect more quickly and efficiently to the value chain. Women have tremendous potential to influence food and land use systems due to their deep engagement in agriculture and decision-making related to nutrition, health, and family planning.
Technological innovations for ensuring that women have equal access to resources like land, labour, water, credit, and other services should be a central focus of policies related to green transitions, including efforts to accelerate the demographic transition to replacement-level fertility.
The author is Associate Director, Transform Rural India (TRI)