Millet Fest rekindles layman’s love for coarse cereals

Hyderabad: The first-ever Millet Festival organised by the Telangana government with an aim to popularise the consumption of millets among common public proved to be a huge success. Even as curtains came down on the three-day festival on Sunday, stall-owners and festival organisers were pleased that consumption of millets had regained their pride of place in the food matrix of rural and urban dwellers alike.

They said growing of millets was downgraded and it almost came to naught following the success of Green Revolution. The festival was started in 2012 when the State was united and the number of visitors had been on a steady rise over the years, the organisers said. State Ministry of Agriculture and College of Home Science, Prof Jayashankar Telangana State Agricultural University (PJTSAU) have jointly organised the festival. Speaking after inspecting the stalls put up at the festival, State Agriculture Minister Pocharam Srinivasa Reddy said the current food habits of people were leading to various diseases. “Consuming millets that are storehouses of nutrition will help people in keeping ailments at bay. It is better to develop the habit of taking nutritive food, instead of going to doctor after getting ill,” he said. Stalls displayed and sold various types of millets including sorghum (jowar), pearl millets, finger millets, little millets, foxtail millets and kodo millets among others. Both raw millets and processed foods were sold.

Processed food included snacks (like jowar muruku, multi-grain muruku, multi-grain laddu, millet cookies etc.), breakfast cereals (like jowar flakes, bajra flakes, muesIi plain and muesli honeycoated, ragi-idly mix etc.) and flours of various millets. There were even dedicated stalls for diabetic patients. They sold foxtail millet (korra) rice, pachcha jonna ravva (green sorghum ravva), ragi malt (finger millet malt) and sajja (pearl millet) murukulu among others. Doctors have acknowledged the importance of coarse cereals as affordable sources of dietary fibre. According to a stall-owner M Manik Rao from Planet and People, BHEL, a private organisation which promotes millets and solar energy, “Some four decades ago, villagers used to treat guests from the cities with rice while their staple food in the villages was millets.

Gradually, villagers also shifted to rice and this was accelerated by a flawed Green Revolution that basically supported huge consumption of water and fertilizers. Millets need very little water and people are now realising their value.” Even the Father of Green Revolution, Dr MS Swaminathan had called upon the people to go back to millets, he said. According to Giridhar, a senior executive of Deccan Development Society (DDS), who operated one of the 60-odd stalls at the Millet Festival, a comparative analysis of nutritive value of millets with other major grains showed that millets scored very highly over other grains including rice and wheat.

Representatives of NGOs like DDS and Grameen Mall Foundation demanded that the State government include millet-based foods in the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS), Midday Meal scheme and in State-run welfare hostels.