It would be mind-boggling to see the wide variety of cereals available in India that are facing extinction and amusing or disgusting to see the official reaction to the numbers. There were 5,500 varieties of rice in West Bengal and 82,000 (as per the Annual Report of National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resource, New Delhi, 2007-08) in all of India. The usual derogatory remarks against those varieties are: “All those varieties were selected by the illiterate farmers”, low yielders with most varieties rarely seen in farmers’ fields.
Not just rice, there were 38,612 varieties of wheat, 7,261 varieties of maize, 50,034 varieties of millets, and 16,427 varieties of gram, apart from 3,868 varieties of brinjal, 4,932 varieties of amaranth, 10,988 varieties of arhar, 4,838 varieties of cotton and 61 breeds of cattle. The “low yielders” criticism is attributed to an inadequate understanding of the varieties because the concept of yield varies from one context to another. It was admitted that there were coloured cotton varieties, tree cotton, tree arhar, tree bhindi and coloured bhindi. Further, dwarf wheat (Triticum spherococcum) was selected and nurtured by the farmers of the Indus Valley and is still in cultivation in India. Coloured maize too is cultivated in some pockets of Jharkhand. MP, Maharashtra, Uttarakhand, Orissa, Tamil Nadu, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh and the Northeastern states. It was also admitted that the Gir and Red Sindhi cows gave substantial quantities of A2 milk and are well- adapted to the Indian climate, unlike the foreign bred Holstein and Jersey.
Sadly, this enormous diversity has not yet been assessed with regard to its nutritive value, ecological advantages and yield potential in various locations. Newly released modern varieties are being launched in the trade channel in the name of “quality seed and new variety” under official subsidy schemes. Modern varieties, older than 10 years, are not entitled to the subsidy. The question is whether the traditional varieties lack those novel characteristics that the new varieties do. The breeder of the new modern variety has no answer because the varieties have not yet been assessed. Instead, there is the institutional compulsion to develop newer fertilizer-responsive varieties ignoring the fact that there is no need to incur an expense for the seeds of traditional varieties. Once procured, they can be cultivated for generations without any chemical fertilisers and pesticides. Prior to chemical-intensive agriculture, seeds were exchanged between farmers, and no one was cheated. Now the seed has become a commodity. According to historians, Sujata offered milk rice (payes or rice-pudding) made of Kalana- mak rice to the fasting Lord Buddha in around the 5th century BC. That aromatic rice is still in cultivation in some provinces of Uttar Pradesh. Around 326 BC, when Alexander the Great invaded India, his army was believed to have carried some Basmati rice for his teacher, Aristotle, in Greece. He coined the name Oruza, from which evolved the scientific name of rice, Oryza sativa. This is a matter of more than 2,000 years ago and the rice varieties are still in cultivation. Yet, farmers today need to buy seeds for each season for “modern certified” crop varieties.
British records of 1766 showed that traditional rice varieties in the Salem and Thanjavur district of Tamil Nadu yielded 12 tons per ha and one rice variety, Kirubilliya, of Karnataka also yielded 12 tons per ha in 1952. The government of India awarded the Krishi Pandit award to the farmer who grew it but what happened to those high-yielding traditional rice varieties? Possibly, the authorities did not feel motivated to conserve and propagate desi high-yielding varieties (HYV) across the country through multi-locational trials. Meanwhile, consecutive droughts, floods or disuse led to their extinction, as was in evidence with the rice varieties of Salem and Thanjavur. Yet, a modern rice variety IR 8 that yielded 6 tons ha in 1966 was declared an HYV. Even today, certain traditional rice varieties like Kerala Sundari, Bahurupi and others yield 6 tons per ha without any chemical fertilizer and seed replacement. Several communities throughout the centuries practised mixed farming and rice was not necessarily the main crop. The Ho community of Paschim Singhbhum district of Jharkhand used to sow short-duration upland rice (aus) along with sorghum, black gram, cowpea, pigeon pea and roselle in the uplands. Finger millet was the other combination with the short-duration upland rice. In many places, millet harvests coincide with the transplantation of amon rice. Harvesting time for barnyard and foxtail millets is August; September is the month for harvesting the early varieties of little and Kodo millets; October is the month for finger millet, maize, and autumn rice; November is the month for harvesting finger millet, the late variety of Kodo and little millet; December is the time to harvest sorghum and winter rice while March-April is when proso millet is harvested.
These grains apart, cultivated and wild tubers were used as food from October-February; velvet beans were used from January onwards; dry mahua flowers, mango, tamarind, siali (Bauhinia vahlii) seeds were consumed, jack fruit and several wild fruits were used as staples. More than 60 types of edible mushrooms are found in forests from the onset of monsoon to October. That gives a picture of how the farmers managed food all year round through mixed farming under rain-fed farming.
Of late, a welcome new pro- gramme ~ Pradhan Mantri Krishi Sinchayee Yojana (PMKSY) ~ has been launched to husband water in agricultural fields. It is about micro-irrigation with sprinklers and a drip system. Flood irrigation with groundwater is a colossal loss and this micro irrigation saves water and increases yield.
Currently, there is a sea of irrigated winter rice (monoculture) in many places. Even in the Kharif season, amon rice is being cultivated with groundwater, given the erratic monsoon rain. However, as was the 2021 experience, a sudden heavy rain, during the later stages of the Kharif season, damaged the rice. This monoculture of modern rice varieties has replaced all other cereals too, even though it is at grave risk. Rice cultivation in the Sundar- bans is affected because flash floods have become a common phenomenon. Upland areas may go for millet cultivation though and there is a need to change food habits along with the inevitable changing climate. However, most Bengalis have changed their food habits from rice to rice-wheat.
The area under irrigated boro rice (summer rice) is huge in many states and has replaced pulse and oilseed crops; so has wheat. The story of lathyrism is an interesting case of food politics and agricultural input business. Just prior to the harvesting of winter rice, the Lathyrus seed (khesari dal or grass- pea or chickling-pea; Lathyrus sativus), a tasty pulse crop is broadcast over the rice field having adequate moisture. Generally, broadcast planting is the method of sowing seeds by scattering them over the surface of the ploughed soil. The pulse crop grows well in winter after harvesting Kharif rice with no ploughing, irrigation, or fertilization. Farmers sow seed from their stock saved from the previous year. Tender twigs of Lathyrus serve as leafy vegetables and fetch a price. After about three months the farmers harvest a substantial pulse crop. Lathyrus, being a leguminous crop, enriches the soil with nitrogen-fixing nodules in a natural cycle of restoration of soil fertility.
Now comes food politics. During the 1970s there was propaganda around lathyrism; that the pulse crop contained a neurotoxin that causes paralysis. A fear psychosis compelled farmers not to grow lathyrus. This was far from what actually happens for someone to develop the symptoms: only if a malnourished man consumes just rice and khesari dal for 60 days continuously might he develop the disease. In reality, one does not consume the same dal every day and in any event, the boiled khesari dal is drained of the water to ward off toxicity. Doctors were of the opinion that there was no report of lathyrism over 80 years when a lot of people consumed the dal.
The upshot of the wrong propaganda was that while khesari is still cultivated, the area under cultivation has drastically declined. Earlier, each block had a substantial area of khesari and there was no question of selling fertilizers, pesticides, seeds and pump sets. In contrast, the boro rice requires several external inputs, but the fear psychosis worked well and a huge number of farmers switched to boro rice, the consequences of which the country is facing today. It needs to be borne in mind that mainstream agriculture does not advocate water-guzzling boro rice that requires 2,500 litres of water to grow a kg of boro rice. Sensible farming is about adopting crop conservation and seed distribution that several farmers, farmers’ organizations and even government farms are espousing because such rice varieties as Kerala Sundari, Bahurupi, Kesabsal Meghadambaru have a grain yield of 5-6 tons per ha without any chemical fertilizers.
There are many others such as a winged paddy variety that has two or three grains in a single paddy, rice with anthocyanin containing leaves, no-boiling rice, black rice with high antioxidants and anthocyanin, nutritive medicinal rice, nutritive coloured maize, coloured cotton, tree bhindi, two- feet long bhindi, chilli with the highest pungency, four-feet long big bottle gourd, brinjal weighing 800 grams, various millets, non-cultivated forest food and such others. It is important that seeds associated with various religious rituals so far extant in villages be revived.
Indeed, the government passed the Bio Diversity Act in 2002 for conserving our crop diversity but it is for society as a whole to support; isolated initiatives will not work. It needs a country on a mission mode with full government backing to ensure that traditional varieties of crops are revived with due consideration to regional agricultural practices, crop varieties and other criteria to ensure a true food secure, well-nourished India.