Why Millets?
Many years ago, I was intrigued by all things green. Like most young adults, I was exploring the world around me in all ways possible, but plants and trees got a lot of my attention. I took to wanting to learn about farming.
My desire led me to many possible teachers and farms. Sometimes, the farm was great but the teacher was not. Sometimes, the farm was too far from the city.
After a lot of searching, I found a farm that was not too far from the city and the teachers were amazing. I decided to learn about this thing they called "farming".
In my learning journey, I noticed that the villagers were eating some form of a roti made from something they called "Jowar". They were busy crushing and grinding this strange-looking pop-corn kind of grain and making these very delicious Rotis. Being an outsider to their state, I was new to this (thankfully, now familiar) grain.
I always thought the world ran on rice and wheat. Who were these people eating these mystical grains? I decided to explore further. I did not get much time to sneak off to the village and learn about Jowar because my work on the farm was quite demanding. Nonetheless, I was finding small windows of time to go learn. But as luck would have it, I was pulled away by some family commitments into the city. Bye-bye, farming lessons. Bye-bye, Jowar. Or so I thought. As life rolled on . . .
. . .hello again, Jowar, 5 years later. I was in the auditorium of the local agricultural university for an event. At the entrance, I saw a beautiful arrangement of various seeds. Of course, Jowar was among them. But why I was there was no coincidence or idle curiosity.
The year that passed us had brought along with it a lot of bad news. The states of Maharashtra and Telangana were recording a very high number of farmer suicides. I was looking at possible solutions and so started from one of the most obvious places - the local agricultural university. There were many sessions that were being presented by various speakers - from the vice-chancellor of the university to the farmers that had gathered from various corners of the state. One session in particular caught my attention - there was a lady explaining how she used permaculture methods to grow things on her one-acre farm. In that session, there were a lot of women huddled in one corner. I knew what was the unsaid here - some of them had lost their husbands to suicide. This scene really pained me. I decided to dig deeper.
And I found that was the problem. "Dig deeper" seemed to be the mantra for greedy borewell owners and reckless "experts" who suggest digging borewells to farmers who could not afford them in the first place. Though there were and still continue to be many reasons for farmer suicides around the world, this one particular farmer widow I spoke to shared, "the debt from the borewell was too much and he could not face the debtor. So he killed himself".
## And why did he have to dig a borewell?
-- Because we needed the water.
## I thought you had a water source in the village. And of course, rain.
-- No, we were not growing dryland crops. We needed water for the cash crop.
I forget at this point whether the cash crop was sugarcane or paddy. Whatever it was, it was certainly not a dryland crop. And what is a dryland crop? Jowar. And other millets like it. The simplest way to understand what a dryland crop is, is to think of them as the crops that would not need more than the natural rainfall to sustain them. Sometimes they are also called rainfed crops.
I further understood that this borewell was the story of one farmer. How many farmers, how many borewells, how much debts, how many suicides? I wanted to find answers to these questions. I don't think simply growing millets is going to solve these problems. I think it is a combination of growing millets because people want to eat them, that can even begin to solve this issue of farmer suicides. There is a subtle but important nuance here, as my cousin was about to teach me two years after I spoke to the farmer's widow.
## How's it going?
-- Good, so nice to see you. I'm glad we are catching up after I don't know how long!
## So, how's the job coming along?
-- Quite good. How about you? What are you up to these days?
## I'm trying to understand how to prevent farmer suicides in dryland region.
-- Interesting! How are you doing that?
## I'm making and selling millet cookies.
-- How can you making millet cookies solve for farmer suicide?
Well, millet cookies can hopefully catch on, then people can understand they can eat more things than just cookies with millets. Then demand for millets will go up. Then farmers have to grow more millets to meet that demand. Then they don't need a lot of water. So they don't need to dig borewells. No debts. No suicides. I mean, that is part of the solution, but one has to start somewhere. I thought of starting with cookies.
My cousin had stopped eating his food and was staring at me blankly, in disbelief. What you are saying essentially, he continued, is that you want to create a market demand for millets?
## Yes.
-- You are mad.
## Yes.
And I diverted the conversation to other, lighter things. When I went home, I was shaking with both fear and excitement. I was excited because I articulated my life mission for the first time to someone in a manner that they could understand. But I was also having fear because, what if I am (joining forces with thousands if not lakhs of people like me of course) unable to create the market? Then I remembered the etymology of the word millet.
The word Millet comes from Proto-Indo-European *melh- to grind, crush.
Will the markets and "forces that be" crush and grind me? Well, let them. Because I am a millet. And the generation after me shall have the rotis of my efforts.
[This blog is part of our endeavour to bring awareness around millets as we march towards the international year of the millet 2023. You can learn more about it on the UN site here: https://digitallibrary.un.org/record/3904090?ln=en]