Components of the Programme

Promoting Household level consumption

• Building prestige in consumption of millets through organising cooking competitions based local culture and celebrations.
• Exposure to various recipes through a process of training, food festivals and campaigns.
• Promotion of ready-to-eat foods with millets such as Ladoos, Murukku and bakery items through local enterprises.
• Awareness building programs on nutritional values of millets to different stakeholders, especially mother committees of women and child department programs and school going children
• Convergence workshops with District/ Block level officials for inclusion of millet in different supplementary nutrition programmes by Govt.

Setting up decentralized Processing facilities :

Absence of modern processing facilities is identified as one of the major bottlenecks in revival of millets. It is envisaged that promoting processing facilities helps in easy access to millet grains. The processing facilities to be promoted in a Block include:

A) At least one Processing Unit / enterprise per cluster of villages/ GPs that includes de-huller, de-stoner and pulverser etc.

B) At least one pulveriser (particularly for Ragi) per Gram Panchayat.

• It is expected that by successfully establishing of such enterprises may kick start local enterprises and encourage household level consumptions. It is envisaged that with experience and increasing production within the Block, larger processing facilities will get established by private partners.

Improving Productivity of Millet Crops :

Millets are cultivated in different farming situations from the low lands to podu lands. There is substantial scope for increasing productivity of millets in these different situations. The action areas include:

A) Establishing Diverse Seed Centres to enable easy access to quality seed in time. The Seed Centres will be linked to the relevant Research Stations. The activities of the Seed Centres include

• Selection, purifying and multiplication of elite performing local varieties through participatory varietal trials.
• Developing and specialising ‘Seed Farmers’ for multiplication, conservation and spread of new varieties and organise them with Seed Centres
• Demonstrations of new/ improved/ purified seed varieties
• Conservation and multiplication of indigenous varieties of seeds.

B) Improved agronomic practices:

In addition to the improved package of practices the following have shown potential

• Introducing System of Millet Intensification based on suitability
• Promotion of Line Transplanting/ Line sowing/ Inter-cropping with millets
• Bio Manure/ composting / in-situ practices for better crop nutrition.
• Pest and disease management practices in the lines of NPM
• Other organic/ agro ecological practices as deemed necessary as per local needs
• Support to the farmers. The skilled person will be known as CRPs. Farmer to farmer learning is the key dissemination strategy.

Custom Hiring Centres (Appropriate Farm Mechanization) :

Establishing custom hiring centres for implements, machines and post-harvest operations (clean millet harvests) at cluster of Gram Panchayats. These include a range of useful equipment with drudgery reductions tools for suitable crop management based on need of community such as cycle weeders, sprayer, pump sets, irrigation equipment, threshers, bio manure preparation containers, sieves, fencing materials etc.

Community Resource Persons

Training of the identified progressive farmers or young local persons on different agronomic practices and other programme thematic areas for implementation based on need and for imparting training and hand holding

Promotion of millets in urban and small towns:

The program targets two types of markets i.e. Rural and Urban and strategies of better price realisation are:

• Promotion and accessing of markets within the Block and district: this happens with help of promotional campaigns and outreach locally.
• Promotion and linkages with markets in nearby towns/ cities and urban areas
• Opening special outlets for farmers, promotional campaign targeting small hoteliers, push-cart vendors, mobile outlets, retail outlets etc are some of the strategies that will be adopted.

Promotion and Establishment of Farmer Producer Organisations:

Comprehensive revival of millets in a Block requires service delivery. The community/ farmers’ level institutional base varies from Block to Block. It is envisaged that FPOs are organised one per Block, keeping long-term sustainability and delivery of services in the view