Promotion of SRI-Millet with Small and Marginal Farmers in Chhattisgarh: A Practitioner’s Manual

Increasing the production of millet by using the SRI-millet method may prove to be one of the significant ways to address the poverty and food insufficiency problem in several tribal areas of Chhattisgarh.

Introduction

C hhattisgarh, once a part of Madhya Pradesh, became a separate state of India in 2001 so that it received a greater stimulus for development. Poor tribal communities make up 60 percent of the rural population in the state. The major sources of livelihood of the people in the area are agriculture, forestry (timber and non-timber products), and livestock. The average landholding per family is very small—only 1–2 hectares (ha), almost all rain-fed, with no irrigation. Households usually have five or six members. Most of the cultivated land is mono-cropped with paddy, with a current average productivity of 2.2 MT/ha. Finger millet is the second major food grain crop in large parts of this state. However, because of the low average productivity of millet, (one tonne/ha), the area under millet cultivation has been decreasing gradually.

Tribal households, especially those that are referred to as the Primitive Tribal Groups (PTGs-Pahari Korbas), continue to cultivate millet as the main crop—they consume millet as a food grain as well as a liquid mixture, locally called pej. Considered ‘minor’ by most agriculturalists, millet has some important uses in the life cycle of PTGs. They use this grain as an essential part of a woman’s diet in the advanced stages of pregnancy, because of its high nutritional value. The roti (bread) made from millet is slow to digest and it is believed ‘stays in the stomach for longer time,’ helping nourish hungry people longer and better. Millet is also usually kept in reserve for the lean period when rice stocks start to diminish.