Tuesday, 21 March 2023 | PNS | DEHRADUN
A meeting of the regional advisory committee on development of millet value chain was organised by National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD) was organised here on Monday. The bank’s chief general manager Vinod Kumar Bist presided over the meeting with Agriculture, Animal Husbandry and Cooperatives secretary BVRC Purushottam as the chief guest.
Presiding over the meeting, Bist highlighted the characteristics of millets and the problems related to their production and said that this coarse grain, once called the food of the poor, has so many nutritious properties which are much higher than other grains. It is easily produced in adaptation to climate change and low input costs and rain fed areas. On this occasion, he expressed gratitude to the Prime Minister Narendra Modi, due to whose efforts the United Nations declared 2023 as the International Millet Year. This has increased awareness in the public and people have started eating more coarse grains than before. He also highlighted the problems of declining area of millet sowing, low availability of high quality seeds, low availability of low FPOs being millet-based, processing, technical aspects, lack of marketing, crop damage of wild animals and other issues. He also appreciated the separate MSP fixed by the state government for millets and said that agricultural universities, KVKs, research institutes and banks will have to come together to formulate a scheme which is short and long term to promote state government millets programme. Highlighting the schemes of NABARD, he said that if all the schemes of the state government and the central government are brought together and worked together in partnership, then it will prove to be a milestone.
Speaking on the occasion, Purushottam informed about the initiative of the state government adding that Uttarakhand is the third state in the country after Gujarat and Odisha to come up with the millet mission. He said that the objective of the mission is marketing, processing, creation of infrastructure, making millet-based FPOs and creating awareness among farmers about millets. Uttarakhand is the first state in the country to include millets in the public distribution system. Due to this, the demand for Manduwa is going to increase a lot, which will benefit the farmers. He said that the state government is working on the millet mission at a swift pace and that in the coming years Uttarakhand will be an exemplary state of the country in terms of millets.
