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Building a Sustainable Millet Ecosystem in ASR District: The VIKASA Experience
Dr S Kiran
Acknowledgments
VIKASA thankfully acknowledges the financial support provided by NABARD as part of the DPR Project on millets (2023-2026) in building the content of this webpage on our efforts in promoting millets in ASR District
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1. The Context...
VIKASA was one of the forerunners in promoting millet cultivation, consumption, and marketing in the tribal areas of the Araku region in Andhra Pradesh state.
All the work and efforts in promoting the millets were taken up under the leadership of Dr S Kiran initially as the Principal Investigator of an IDRC Canada-funded project through WASSAN (from 2010 to 2014) and later supported by NABARD between 2014 and 2016 to provide quality seed material to the tribal farmers and again as part of the DRP Project on Millets from 2023 to 2026.
Concerted efforts in promoting the millets had a modest beginning in 2010 starting with conducting the Participatory Varietal trials with local and improved varieties of both Finger millet and Little millet (which form 98% of the total millet acreage in Araku & Dumbrigida Mandals whcih are the highest millet growing mandals in the erstwhile Visakhapatnam District and current ASR District), organizing millet recipe trainings, conducting field days, exposure visits, setting up millet processing options for the first time in the district, connecting the millet cultivation with their traditions & culture so that the latent knowledge about its cultivation, storage & consumption would be shared among themselves in those festive days etc.
After initiating the work on millets in the later part of the 2010, VIIASA organized a Participatory Rural Appraisal in the year of 2011, inviting more than 30 farmers / key informants from across villages to understand how the millet cultivation has changed over a period of 60 years, so that key issues pertaining to its cultivation, consumption and marketing are high lighted and necessary planning could be taken up to address these issues.
The sixty-year period was subdivided into four time periods, starting from 1951 with a 20-year interval (1951, 1971, 1991 and 2011). All the participants were informed that this exercise gives an overview of how millet acreage under different crops has changed over a sixty-year period. The exercise was completed with the help of all the participants by taking their opinions on the information that the old women in the group were narrating about the changes in the crop acreages.