Millet’s cultivation in India: Challenges and Opportunities towards achieving sustainable farming and inclusive development

Abstract

Millets are cultivated in resource poor areas of our nation by small and marginal farmers. Being climate resilient, improving their production and productivity through the use of improved high-yielding varieties is the source to address many of the malnourishment issues faced by our women, children, and low-income groups. The establishment of Millets Park, the creation of a new millet movement empowering primitive, vulnerable tribal groups, and ensuring gender diversity are challenges and opportunities to be explored towards achieving sustainable farming and inclusive development.Millets remain a powerhouse of proteins in our cultivated cultivated mostly following the traditional methods of cultivation in rural areas, it needs very significantly less fertilizer application and offers more health benefits to our increasing population; it offers more scope towards offers more health benefits to our increasing population; it offers more scope for value addition or creating more employment opportunities for the rural and urban youth of our nation. Increased targeted marketing of value-added millets among the needed population based on their segmentation is sure to bring about an economic transformation in rural areas. With at present higher minimum support prices offered to millets than major crops like rice or wheat, increase in production and productivity of our millets are sure to fetch more remunerative returns to the millets cultivating small and marginal farmers. However, more needs to be done to promote millet cultivation in our nation, taking into account based on our development needs and priorities in the short and long term. traditional varieties with high-yielding millet varieties, which fetches higher production and productivity to the millets cultivating farmers. The rise in the area under cultivation of millets is seen on an increasing trend from 12. 29 million hectares to 15.48 tonnes from 2013- 2014 to 2021- 2022.

DOI

https://doi.org/10.29321/MAJ.2024.11104.1150

Pages

137 - 141

Creative Commons

Copyright

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Madras Agricultural Students' Union in Madras Agricultural Journal (MAJ). This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited by the user.

Keywords