What has made Odisha Millets Mission a success story in such a short time

For thousands of farmers, the path towards relative higher income has been smoothened by active help from the Odisha Millets Mission

Golap Bishi, a second-generation farmer from Odisha’s Bolangir district has traditionally been cultivating cotton lured by high returns and a ready market.

After several years of cotton farming, the productivity of Bishi’s land started declining. The production cost also went up due to an increase in the price of fertilisers, pesticides and daily wages.

A worried Bishi turned towards the traditional wisdom of inter-cropping cotton with milletS, something which his father, grandfather and generations before them practiced for ages.

The results, Bishi records in an official document, were visible in just a few seasons.

Not only the per-hectare income improved, the productivity of the land also started showing appreciable gains.

According to records, Bishi intercropped finger millet with sorghum, maize, green gram, and black gram in 6:4 ratios in a one-acre plot of land.

After a few months, he harvested 3.2 quintals of finger millet, three quintals of sorghum, 3.5 quintals of maize, and one quintal of pulses for which he invested just around Rs 4,500 while the total realisation was somewhere around Rs 33,644.

Thus translating into a broad average income of almost Rs 29,144.

For thousands of farmers like Bishi, the path towards relatively higher income has been smoothened by active help from the Odisha Millets Mission (OMM) that provided all the necessary support starting from seeds, per hectare incentive to grow millets and most importantly, procurement at reasonable rates.

Amid all the focus on millets and their intrinsic benefits for human health and also farmers, OMM, is a model which is being repeatedly talked about as ideal for states for adopting to boost millet production.

A NITI Aayog study titled ‘Health and Nutrition, Practice Insight’ done a few years back showed that there has been 215 per cent increase in gross value of millet produce per farmer household in Odisha from Rs 3,957 to Rs 12,486 between 2016-17 and 2017-18 after the Mission was launched.

So what it is that makes OMM such a success story in a relatively short span of time?

The answer perhaps lies in the whole design of the programme and also the focus on ensuring that the whole farm-to-fork value chain gets involved in the same.

This ensures that not only do consumers get millets at affordable rates and the crop does not just remain confined to a few products and varieties, but becomes a part of daily consumption of poor people while on the other hand, farmers who are at the other end of the spectrum get a right price for their produce that keeps them interested in the crop.

Why millets?

Millets are sometimes also called nutri-cereals as they are richer in fibre, proteins, iron, copper, zinc, vitamins and other nutrients than other cereals like rice and wheat.

A country-wide study done by 7 global organizations in four countries a few years back found that millets can boost the growth of children and adolescents by 26-39 per cent when they replace rice in standard meals.

According to reports, across the world, around 300 millet species are grown, but only about 12 are commonly used in the human diet.

In them jowar and bajra are the major millets, whereas ragi, foxtail millet, barnyard millet, proso millet, kodo millet and little millet are the minor ones.

Asia, along with Africa, accounts for almost 97 per cent of the global millet production of around 30-31 million tonnes in which India is the dominant player, contributing 40-45 per cent of the same.

In OMM, the agriculture department broadly focuses on three major components.

These are improved production of millets, ensuring their local consumption, procurement under MSP and distribution through PDS and state nutrition programmes.

For improving production, the state gives a per hectare incentive of around Rs 26,500 spread over a period of five years for adopting better agronomic practices.

In 2017-18, around 5000 farmers benefited from the incentive programme which has reached around 160,000 by 2022-23.

When it comes to procurement, OMM has ensured that procurement of ragi, one of the main millets grown in the state, has steadily risen from 7,895 quintals in 2018-19 to around 639,503 quintals in 2021-22, a steep jump.

The procurement was done at MSPs ranging from Rs 2,897 per quintal in 2018-19 to Rs 3,377 per quintal in 2021-22 benefitting almost 93,000 farmers in total during the same period.

The procured millets were then sold to the poor to enrich their nutritional levels through their inclusion in PDS and state nutrition programs.

This ensured that millets just not remained a niche consumed item, but were mainstreamed as well.

“One big thrust of OMM was to mainstream millets as an item of daily household consumption which was done through multiple measures such as millet melas and introducing millets in aanganwadis and mid-day meal schemes. Because, since the very beginning we were very clear in our concept that if millet has to survive it has to come out of the urban fascination and become an item of daily use,” Dinesh Balam, state coordinator of OMM, told Business Standard.

He said even the processing of millets was done at the grassroots level by helping FPOs and others in setting up village-level small processing units that could process 50 kilograms in an hour.

As a result of the multi-pronged approach, millet production in Odisha has jumped from 0.12 million tonnes in 2017-18 to 0.26 million tonnes in 2022-23 Kharif season, a rise of almost 167 per cent in less than five years.

The yield challenge

Although much attention is being paid to millets and boosting their production, when it comes to yield, millets are far behind their next best challengers  - wheat and rice.

While wheat has an average per-hectare yield of around 3,500 kg and paddy gives a yield of around 2,600 kg. In contrast, most millets individually give an average yield that is much less than wheat and rice.

India’s annual production of millets has risen from around 17.26 million tonnes during 2019-20 to 18.02 million tonnes in 2020-21 according to the Parliament's reply, a growth of 4.40 per cent.

In contrast, wheat and rice production during the same time period has grown from 227 million tonnes to 244 million tonnes, a rise of 7.40 per cent.

Millets perhaps need a big technological jump through high-yielding varieties and better farming practices to become mainstream in the true sense.