The coarse winner

Bhani is a small hilly village with about 50 households in the Uttarkashi district of Uttarakhand. It lacks irrigation facilities and the farmers here, as also in the nearby villages have traditionally cultivated ragi, jhingora and kauni. These are millets that can be grown in dry areas.

“As there were no takers for these coarse grains, most of it was used as fodder for cattle,” recalls Jagmohan, a marginal farmer in Bhani. However, things changed after Mrida, a social business venture for rural development, began procuring the millets from them.

Under the brand name ‘Earthspired’, the start-up produces millet-based value-added products — flour mixes that blend these ‘coarse staples’ with other nutritious and healthful ingredients — and these are in great demand now.

“We could have never imagined that these coarse grains would one day sell at such high prices,” says Jagmohan. The products sell at ₹25-65 a kg, depending on the variety of the millet.

Considered ‘magic seeds’, millets are highly nutritious, full of fibre and have a short growing period under dry and high-temperature conditions. Also, being gluten-free, millets are used as health food, especially by diabetics.

Mrida procures varieties of millets and amaranth from the Farmers Federation and self-help groups in the villages of Uttarkashi. Yashwant, who looks after the marketing of one such federation, coordinates the supply chain of millets for Mrida. He says farmers sell 200-500 kg of millets depending on the size of their landholding and earn ₹5,000-20,000 per crop. In the process, many small and marginal farmers in the area have been empowered financially. Yashwant, whose income too has increased, says farmers in the region are now able to send their children to good schools and buy TV and other home appliances.

Besides blended flours, the millets are used to produce a range of ‘Earthspired’ premix for cookies. These highly nutritious biscuits, multigrained millet-based flours and snacks are currently marketed through niche channels such as exhibitions, nutritionists and digital media platforms.

For the processing, it has partnered with the Swami Sivananda Memorial Institute (SSMI), a Delhi-based organisation working in resettlement colonies in the area of education, child development and women’s empowerment. The women working in the food production centre at SSMI belong to weaker sections of society. Mrida group co-founder Arun Nagpal says plans are afoot to set up processing units close to the villages where the millets are cultivated. “This will help in providing employment to women and income generation opportunities to people at the grassroots,” he says.

The writer is a senior journalist based in Delhi

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