Grains Of Life: How Chotanagpur’s Adivasis Are Reviving Native Varieties Of Rice

By Anumeha Yadav 

Deep inside the lush sal forest in Odisha’s Sundargarh, Albisia Lakda, an Adivasi farmer living in Subdega block had divided the rice crop on her two-acre plot of farmland in two sections. With the monsoon fluctuating widely last year, parts of Odisha experienced long dry spells and crop failures.

Now, in the plot she called the berna (low-lying land), which collects the most rain, Lakda continued to plant ‘Annapurna’, a modern hybrid variety of rice, which she referred as sarkaari dhaan (government rice). In the guda (upland), she had gone back to growing the crops of her ancestors – indigenous, or heirloom rice varieties called Kalamaliphool, Bahalguda, Lusri and Luhini.

The native seed varieties, which have survived several environmental vagaries in their evolutionary history do better in unpredictable weather and ensure food security, say farmers. They also help stave off the escalating costs of input-intensive modern hybrid varieties of rice.

What Lakda enjoys the most is the taste of these rice varities. “Lusri (a brown rice) is delicious even if you [it] eat two days later,” she says. Along with planting four native rice varieties, Lakda grows gourds, kurthi (black gram), urad lentils as she “cannot afford to buy dal otherwise”.

In the next block, Balisankara’s Kakerjor village, Kamalsagar Kullu, a young farmer, dressed in a T-shirt and shorts, was returning after working in his fields. He also did not let go of his family’s heirloom rice varieties.

Kullu readily spoke of the rice varieties he grows – Sariyaguda, Kaniaaguda, Juiguda, Budhaguda – which survived even when the monsoons wavered and ensured grains for the family. There were also varieties such as Kolamaliphool that survived excess water from flooding, said Kullu, explaining the unique resilience and adaptability of the varieties he preferred.

“Then, there are rice plants that develop a red-coloured sheath which are high in medicinal properties… Our elders say, Kalawati, Luchai are good to eat as they help control blood sugar levels,” he said.

Recognising Kullu’s efforts, the state government had awarded him the “best organic farmer” award at a district level event in 2016 but he did not receive any other state assistance since then. Yet, he continued his way of cropping.

“In the middle, for a few years, we lost many of our older rice seeds, and the seeds had got mixed up,” recounted Lakda, in the courtyard of her hut sheltered by a tamarind tree in the interior Kalumara village.

“Then three years ago, I started growing traditional rice again as it grows without chemical fertilisers,” she added.

“The [quantity of the] produce from the traditional seeds and practices is a bit lower compared to modern hybrid varieties, it is true, but our own rice seeds sprout even when the rains fail, or even when the rain lasts a brief spell,” Kullu said. He claimed to have distributed the indigenous seeds to 50 other farming families in the vicinity.

A necessary diversity

Rice, now a staple of a majority of Indians, was domesticated in the broad region from the foothills of the Eastern Himalayas in India to China about 6,500-7,000 years ago. While its primacy as occupying the largest area among all food crops continues, over the past five decades, it underwent an irreversible genetic erosion, with the disappearance of thousands of native rice seed varieties from farms in India.

Half a century ago, more than 1,10,000 distinct varieties of rice grew in India, plant scientist R.H. Richharia noted. These included rice that could survive on dry land farms without irrigation, deep-water farms and those which could withstand saline water on coastal farms.

The advent of the Green Revolution meant the government subsidised and heavily promoted a few imported high-yielding varieties, based on applying petrochemical inputs, such as pesticides and fertilisers. Within years, the number of native rice landraces that took thousands of years to evolve had dwindled from over one lakh to around 6,000, a loss of more than 90% of indigenous rice varieties.

A 2023 study by the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) found that the green revolution’s breeding programmes – focused on high-yielding varieties – have resulted in worsening the staple grain’s nutrients, zinc and iron had decreased by 33% and 27% in rice.

While the traditional varieties were neglected as low yielders, that lodge and mature late, rice conservationists contend that this was not true for all native varieties. Dr Anupam Paul, who has promoted 400 native rice varieties working as a rice conservationist in Fulia district in West Bengal and worked for 30 years in the government’s agriculture office, says considering all traditional rice varieties as having less yield was “an over-simplification”.

“It was like declaring all Indians are naked fakirs (beggars) or all Indians are black skinned. It merely satisfied the foreign bosses and accommodated chemical intensive farming,” Dr Paul told The Wire.

The narrow focus on rice yield alone wiped out thousands of seed varieties, destroyed rice’s diversified gene pool, and made soils unproductive over the long term. Now, with worsening climate change, it means lower resilience as several of the native seeds, selected in the hands of ancient cultivators over centuries, possessed the ability to adapt and grow as per the local ecological niches.

For example, Dr Debal Deb, an agro-ecologist who set up a seed bank in Odisha, in a 2019 essay in the Scientific American has documented landraces growing in the regions of Odisha, Bengal, Jharkhand such as Lakshmi dighal, Rani kajal and Jabra which can elongate their stems as floodwaters rise.

Other rice varieties like Matla, Getu and Kallurundai can grow even on saline soil and survive incursion of rising sea levels. Deb explained that in a drought, indigenous varieties of Kelas, Rangi, Gadaba, Kaya may give greater yields than even the modern HYVs (High Yielding Varieties).

Others such as Dudhe Bolta and Garib-Sal rice have abundant micronutrients such as iron and zinc. The traditional landraces, thus, hold the capacity to provide reliable means of providing food security to smallholder farmers.

The disappearance of these indigenous crops is accompanied by the loss of knowledge and expertise of identifying and cultivating these native varieties, which include hundreds of aromatic varieties, those with medicinal properties, rich in specific nutrients, and crucially, the plasticity to adapt to unpredictable weather.

‘Taste of spring in one’s mouth’

In hamlets nestled inside Sundargarh’s sal forests, farmers identified dozens of varieties of rice their ancestors had grown for years, categorising them by their appearance, qualities, level of land they thrive on, and the corresponding water needs. Farmers in northern Odisha referred to the low-lying  lands that collected the most water as the Bahal, Berna in which grew the longer duration rice, which was the most nutritious, and the Maal and Guda as lands on which they grew traditional rice varieties that needed less water, and could even survive a deficient monsoon. Farmer spoke of their family’s rice varieties and why they were preferred.

“We grew Machkantha, Sapri, Mangraphool – whose sheath is red and very tasty – all as Bahal rice. We grew Karagutha a Berna long duration rice, Bhajna which is both Bahal and Berna, then Raigadi, Kaladhaan(a black rice), Barhasaal which was fragrant like Basmati, and Lusri which grows in less water, and Khandsagar,” recounted Rudra Behera, an elderly farmer in Subdega’s Mayabahal village, who says in one look he could tell apart all these different rice grains that he grew up with.

Another elderly farmer Ravindra Gop compared the taste of the native varieties such as Nohachi dhaan to having rice with milk, so fresh and delicious, “as if you could taste the spring in your mouth,” he said.

Behera said that it was much after the Green Revolution, and more recently in the past five years that the switch to “foundation dhaan” or hybrids hastened after the state government started procuring rice locally to distribute in the public distribution system.

“Desi [local] red rice varieties are richer in nutrition but the government does not procure desi varieties – red rice is rejected in procurement for white rice. They give loans to buy hybrids varieties, which then fetch higher price in procurement,” Behera said.

In a neighbouring village Mayabahal, Sudharshan Toppo, an Adivasi farmer, who used to grow the hardy, less-water Lusri, Bhajna, as well as Khandsagar rice varieties, which ripen in 90-120 days, traced the turn away from native rice to Rengali dam canal’s irrigation water reaching their village 20 years back.

“The question a farmer growing desi dhaan (rice) faces is: If you grow desi, what will you earn?” said Veronica Dungdung, a social activist who grew up in Subdega, a forested area on the border of Jharkhand and northern Odisha.

Dundung started collecting and organising the rice varieties native to the area in 2018 after seeing the changes in agrarian systems and life around her. “I feel that growing up, we had a certain food self- sufficiency from both the farm and the forest,” she said. “Now, with intensive pesticides, urea use, the soil fertility is in decline, and the forest has been thinned out and extensively cleared.”

As part of her work at the Samajik Seva Sadan, a small NGO that she had founded, she shared seeds of 12 traditional varieties with 445 farmers in Subdega and Bargaon blocks in the past five years.

Dungdung said income versus the rising costs of the petro-chemical inputs do not add up to small farmers’ advantage in any real way. Moreover, they noticed that the “hybrid varieties shrivelled faster and collapsed when the rains varied from year to year, compared to our traditional less water varieties.”

“Small farmers were already growing it, but market pressures built up. But our livelihoods are not about money alone, isn’t it? The communities here already grew indigenous rice and it is in our culture. We are trying to support them to continue it and to revive cultivation where the seeds have totally vanished,” she said.

She added: “Market determines all life [everything] these days – what we eat, we wear. Market ka formula [the way of the market] has entered and dominated our lives, our imagination and minds. But that cannot be our way of life, I believe.”

Jyoti Dungdung, an Oraon Adivasi farmer, is one of the farmers who had joined the grassroots effort to revive native seeds. In early hours of the morning, dhundhuk-dhuk dhundhuk-dhuk (the hum and beat of the rhythmic pounding of brown rice) in a dheki, filled the air at her home in Karlaghati village.

The simple wooden tool is used in rural homes to remove the husk from paddy to make rice, and is believed to further preserve the micronutrients lost in the abrasive large scale polishing of rice in mills. Dungdung estimated that she usually de-husked around 10 kilograms of brown rice in an hour’s work in the dheki (an agricultural tool used for threshing, to separate rice grains from their outer husks), to eat it fresh.

Last year, Dungdung planted Sarno, a hybrid rice needing regular chemical fertilisers to sell in the market. But she devoted the largest part of her field to Lusri, a longer duration heirloom brown rice. “It grew easily without chemical inputs and fill our family’s plates,” she said, “And the best part is, it feels light and good in one’s stomach. Recently, even those from Rourkela, Bhubhaneshwar who have diabetes have started reaching out asking for this rice as it is much better for health.”     

“Abandoned food that is special”

Across the state border, in Jharkhand, in a similar pattern, hybrid and high yielding varieties of rice are ubiquitous, accounting for more than two-thirds of the crop area. As per an estimate, ten years ago,  traditional varieties were grown on only around 20% of the cultivated area of rice.

In 2020-21, Jharkhand had over 1,700 thousand hectares under rice cultivation, nearly eight times more than its other main cereals of maize and wheat. It produced 5,1230 quintals of paddy.

Last year, after a series of droughts, they faced the lowest rainfall in 121 years while waiting to plant paddy in the kharif summer season. Such changes in weather have made the future uncertain for the vast majority of its farmers who still practice rain-fed farming.

Farmers in upper reaches of the Netarhat plateau, in Latehar, who have no means of irrigation say many have continued to cultivate distinct varieties of traditional rice. Like in Odisha, they have their own unique landraces of rice that have a unique built-in resilience to vagaries of the weather.

In Sohar panchayat in Latehar, the mukhiya (chief) Magdalih Toppo, who lives in Pakripaat, a village of 40 odd Oraon Adivasi families said most families still grew desi or dhehaati dhaan (indigenous rice). She named ten varieties of dehaati dhaan, that are suitable to either Taand (upland, with less water), or the Doin (lowland with more water) and the land is further divided as per slope and fertility and seeds sown accordingly.

Toppo spoke of growing Ranikajar (with tiny grains, great taste, used for making sweets out of rice flour on festivals), Jeeraphool, Kanamchopa, Somphiya, Kalamdaani (Doin varieties), red rice such as Hardiguda, and medicinal rice such as Karanga. She grew multiple Doin rice, along withmillets of madua and gondli that survived in even less water.

“Many homes here have own seeds since generations, which breed true (allowing the families to collect the seeds year after year). We do not have to buy anything for growing these, and we don’t wish to switch to hybrids,” she explained how the farmers collected the seeds for the next year from the center of the plot, and after drying and cleaning it, stored it carefully for the next year.

“But then, everyone’s faith is different – some are attracted to hybrids for more yield,” Toppo added that the village still had a communal way of sharing the work of sowing, and mutually arrived on decisions such as how much they would pay one another for helping in sowing, based on what most of them could afford. “So, for example, for Rs 130 a day, they will come to sow my fields, and then later for the same, I will go to their farm for the sowing work.”

Other small farmers spoke of their own families’ dehaati dhaan.

Teresa Tithio who was picking saag for the evening meal said she grew Kalamdaani in deep water land, and Guda varieties in the taand (upland). “We have no means of irrigation here in pathaar (plateau), yet the traditional rice grows, not in very large quantities, but it grows reliably. We incur almost no costs to grow it.”

She pointed out that the traditional varieties leave enough paddy straw for fodder, and the straw is used to grow mushroom.

Simprosa Saras, a Adivasi farmer in Chormunda village said her neighbours had switched to hybrids “as these grow a lot of baal (panicles, or seed clusters)” but that she had observed how compared to the traditional the hybrid varieties needed more labour, and more chemical inputs.

“If one sees one’s neighbours’ fields, then one gets tempted to copy, and abandon one’s own seeds,” she said. “But the chemicals kill the worms on the earth and then you need to add more and more chemicals.”

Sohar panchayat, made up of remote Adivasi habitations, atop the Netarhat plateau, has waged a struggle against forced displacement for the government’s proposed firing range for military practice for over three decades.

Ignacio Tithio, an elderly woman in the village, who was among the leaders of a grassroots anti-displacement movement rued about what was being lost. “We would grow the rice in the deeper water areas and in Taand (upland) we would grow madua gondli small millets along with it, which need nothing and almost grow on their own. Some of our food is medicinal, for instance, we feed madua (ragi) roti to anyone who has tuberculosis,” she recounted.

“But three-four years back, many stopped growing desi dhaan,” she said. She said traders from Ghagra, Lohardaga, 40-50 km away, would offer new seeds and then also offer to purchase the crop, promising an assured market: “We left the vishesh (unique), and got distracted by other varieties.”

“Ab jaise-jaise hoshiyar ho rahein hain, baahri gyaan bahut ho gaya, baahri ka cheez ugaa rahein hain, bas ghar se beej nikal gaya (we have become smarter, so to say, we want to grow what the outsiders offered. But this way, our seeds left our homes,” Tithio lamented.

This article has been republished from The Wire.