Nidhi Trivedi and Ashutosh Kumar, the two PhD researchers of the NWO project, have now each completed sixteen months of ethnographic research in two different Adivasi villages. They investigated how millets are embedded in the lifeworlds of the local communities. Moreover, they asked how all these macro-level initiatives and policies work out locally, in the lives of farmers who traditionally cultivate millets and have valued this food without ever thinking about it in terms of Sustainable Development Goals. Their preliminary results show that from the current local perspective millets look less glamorous and recent changes have produced ambivalences and contradictions.

Nidhi works with an Indigenous community called Parenga, who traditionally cultivate both millets on dry fields and rice in irrigated river-fields. Ashu has been living with the Didayi, another Adivasi community that inhabits steeper hills and practices shifting cultivation, where different sorts of cereals and pulses are sown into the same field (also called “swiddens”). Until recently, rice for the Didayi only played a marginal role. It soon became clear to both of them that millets, especially finger millet (Eleusine coracana (L.) Gaertn.), pervade the life of the people in diverse ways.

Finger millet, locally called mandia, is embedded in many rituals. The Parenga consider it to be a form of the goddess of wealth, Lakmi, for the Didayi millets embody their deceased during death rituals. Finger millet is closely connected to life and health, especially in the most commonly consumed form, as a thick gruel. Processing of finger millets after the harvest is very important for the Parenga and Didayi. In the case of Didayi, respect towards the crop becomes manifest in its processing. Family members and friends come together and provide their collective labor. As a rule, the same group of people with whom thrashing of finger millets started should be present throughout the process. The absence of any of the members on any day of processing is considered as disrespectful towards the crops. Sarbi Muduli, one of Ashu’s Didayi interlocutors, told him:

“If on all of the days the same people are not there, mandia (finger millets) will get angry. The harvest will get reduced. If more people attend [than at the beginning] that is fine, but there should not be less.”

Such customary ways of cultivation and processing are currently changing. Recent innovations in technology, cultivation techniques and government distribution programs, some of them initiated through the Odisha Millet Mission (OMM), led to ambiguous results. In most villages, mills are now available, so that the tedious work of milling by hand, done exclusively by women, is no longer necessary. However, the taste is different, people say, and for ritual use, many prefer millets prepared by hand.

In the case of Parenga, some villagers now use tractors for threshing, instead of threshing by hand. Yet, as millets are also perceived as living beings, some farmers state that this new form of processing frightens the grain and reduces its nutritional value. The reduced labor through machine milling is, moreover, partly made void since the Parenga have added a second cycle of wet-rice cultivation to the annual round. Again, the main work of transplanting and weeding is done by women. Next to an increase of labor, this hot-season paddy requires fertilizer and hybrid as well as high-yielding seeds are used. According to the farmers, this decreases the quality of the soil and has resulted in many places in the death of all the aquatic animals living in the rivers into which the rice fields are terraced. In the case of the Didayi, the introduction of chemical fertilizers is recent but very popular among young farmers. In most cases the application of chemical fertilizer is limited to the rain fed land. However, there are reservations among the elders in the village. Prahalad Pujari, a village elder, commented:

“Adding medicine [aso, here: “chemical fertilizers”], black gram, dongor rani [“Hill Queen”, a pulse], finger millet, little millet, all will die. This paap [divine transgression] will affect us."

The OMM has introduced new cultivation techniques for finger millet to the local farmers, which actually led to an increase in production. The downside is that fallow periods for the fields have been reduced as well, which leads to a deterioration of the soil. Moreover, other measures by the government have reduced the interest in millets and resulted in the decrease of crop diversity. One such policy is the above-mentioned Public Distributions System (PDS), through which the government supports poor people, those “Below Poverty Line” (BPL), which concerns the vast majority of people in this highland region. For decades, the PDS has been dominated by rice, individuals eligible for the program receiving five kg per person per month. While this policy has guaranteed “food security” from the state’s point of view, it has also resulted in an ethnographically observable homogenization of dietary and cultivation practices. The Didayi, Ashu argues, have through this scheme basically been transformed from millet to rice eaters. Even though it is unclear if it is a direct result of the distribution of rice through the PDS, the Didayi have only recently started to cultivate this crop in their swiddens. One of his interlocutors, Budha Muduli, told Ashu: “it has been eight to ten years that the cultivation of paddy started in the shifting cultivation fields”.

Another factor that locally results in the reduction of crop diversity and a reduced cultivation of millets is the competitive role of “cash crops”, i.e. agricultural products that are grown for profit. Demand for cash has increased in recent years and where earlier millets have been cultivated, now cashew nuts or eucalyptus trees for the paper industry are grown. Furthermore, new experiments in horticulture are under process as fruit trees such as coconut and lemon are supplied by the government to be grown for the market.