Sitting on the front porch of her home, Anjamma Nadimidoddi proudly displays her seed collection of 80 rainfed crops – most of them millets, pulses and oilseeds. She never went to school or read about them anywhere. Yet, she knows everything there is to know about these seeds, their sowing windows, preferred soil conditions, pests and diseases. Much of that knowledge she gained from her grandma when she was a child, the rest she learned over decades from the land.
Anjamma is a Dalit woman from Gangwar, a remote village in Telangana state, on the semi-arid Deccan plateau of South India. Disadvantaged in class, caste and gender, she was on the lowest rung of social hierarchy in her village. She saw destitute poverty in her childhood, working as a farm labourer for measly wages, helping her family secure two meals a day. And as Dalit, she was subject to humiliating untouchability practices.
Things changed in the late 1980s, when a local NGO encouraged women in villages around her state to form farmers’ collectives, or sanghams. Deccan Development Society (DDS), worked to unite the most marginalized people and utilize their indigenous knowledge on seeds, crops and food diversity to fight hunger, poverty and social deprivation. Since those crops included millets, Anjamma and her knowledge of seeds became instrumental in designing the organization’s initiatives.
“Millets are the traditional crops of the region,” says Anjamma. “They sustained our forefathers for generations.”
This was before commercial mono-cropping took hold in the region in the 1970s and 1980s, with crops that were “locally unsuitable”, she says.
“It wiped out local rainfed crops like millets, which were once our staple and best suited to the soils here.”
But as more and more farming collectives began sprouting up across Anjamma’s district in the 1980s, so, gradually, did millets. Today, Dalit plots of land on the edges of villages – long seen as barren wastelands unfit for agriculture – hold a rich diversity of nutritious millets that not only feed families but also fetch good income.
Along the way, the crop’s revival has become an embodiment of larger socio-economic, ecological and cultural shifts in the region.
For one, land degradation has come to a halt as collectives returned to organic manuring, agroforestry and traditional mixed-cropping systems.
Secondly, farm households have become completely food secure, thanks to a greater diversity of nutrition-rich crops. This, in turn, has increased the power women hold in their homes, as their knowledge, labour and income take centre stage.
A similar shift has happened in the community: thanks to their millet production, Dalit women no longer have to work their landlord’s fields for a pittance, instead becoming a self-reliant community. As a result, they have become important village elders, respected for their knowledge and achievements.
Along the way, millets themselves have shed their old reputation as ‘poor man’s food’ and are enjoying new prestige as the nutritious crops that ask for little and offer a lot.
In 2019, Anjamma was honoured by the national government for saving her more than 80 local seed varieties and today she is an elected member of her local government.
“We lived in the margins, in extreme poverty,” she recalls. “We revived millets on degraded lands, which gave us food, nutrition and livelihoods. Now, we are proud conservers of biodiversity.”
See other success stories on millets from India here.
