“A female elephant rubbing white Koothalam flowers,
which bloom on dark green bushes,
You look like white herons sitting on lush green leaves,
When she grazes millet, her skin becomes speckled with flower pollen
Sweet sleep before sleeping.”
These lines from the Sangam era, written about 2,000 years ago, provide lyrical evidence that we – humans and animals – have been eating millets for a long time. Further evidence comes from archaeological-botanical studies, excavations in the Indus Valley, the Vedas, epics, and centuries of poetry and cookbooks.
In fact, according to the Famine Commission report issued after one of the worst famines ever to hit India, most Indians still ate millet in the late 1800s. As the report stated, “Millet and pulses… are hardy plants, and can tolerate much irregularities… Rice is more delicate, and are destroyed if the plants are either immersed too deeply, or their roots are left dry for too short a day”. It states that, except in West Bengal and Assam and the river deltas of the southern states, less than 5% of India’s population eats rice, and millets are grown in most of the cropland.
What happened?
I explored the “why and how” of this change in my 2021 book, Watersheds, but suffice it to say that while the British held the idea that technology could reshape water resources (indigenous hydroengineering like Kallanai worked with water resources) and encouraged such crop changes with their cash taxes, perhaps the more dramatic change came with the Green Revolution.
If we notice, in 1966-67, paddy was grown in less than 7% of the fields in Punjab. Indigenous, drought-resistant varieties of gram and maize dominate both in area and production. Today, Punjab grows very little millet, and a double crop of wheat-rice is grown in vast expanses of its fields. Of course, it is not just Punjab. Across India, areas that once depended on resilient millet have shifted to water-intensive rice and wheat. Borewells enabled the transformation, but a changed demand sealed the deal: specifically, government purchases of rice and wheat. The result is clear – since 1970, India’s millet acreage has fallen by almost half.
This is a shame, because millet is just what the doctor ordered for both personal and planetary health. Just look at the numbers. 100 grams of raw milled rice provides mostly carbohydrates as well as 2.8 grams of fiber and 7.9 grams of protein. In contrast, the same amount of millet provides four times more fiber along with significantly more protein. The story of minerals is even more telling. Millet provides an astonishing 50 times more calcium and seven times more magnesium than rice!
Other millets provide double to four times (or more) that of rice in terms of calcium, magnesium, zinc and iron.
Study after study shows that consuming millet stabilizes blood sugar, reduces inflammation and oxidative stress, and reshapes the gut microbiome. This triad is based almost entirely on treating the diseases now prevalent in India: type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, fatty liver, heart disease. Indeed, studies show that diets that include millet have been shown to have lipid-lowering, blood pressure modulation, microbiome repair, and even anti-cancer indications.
In one experiment, diabetic rats fed a diet containing 20% finger millet seed coat for six weeks significantly reduced fasting glucose and HbA1c levels, improved kidney markers, healthy lipid profiles and even reduced cataract formation compared to controls. Overall, the findings suggest that finger millet seed coat regulates biochemical pathways, thereby reducing diabetes-related complications.
It’s more than just fiber and minerals. Studies have shown that the polyphenols present in millet provide powerful health benefits. For example, researchers raised 40 lab rats under identical conditions but with different diets: a control group on a standard diet; One cancer group was given chemicals to induce inflammation-induced colorectal cancer and given a standard diet; A cancer group was fed millet; And a cancer group was fed rice.
They matched fiber levels in the standard diet and the millet diet to isolate the effect of the grains. After several weeks, the mice eating millet developed fewer tumors and lived longer than the standard-diet cancer group. Rats eating poor rice fared the worst. Further investigation revealed that millet reprogrammed the gut microbiome of the mice, reducing the inflammatory environment in which colorectal cancer thrives.
Yes, the same gut biome we explored last time is helped by millet.
Kumar Sankaran, whose company Leucine Rich Bio has studied the composition of over 1.5 lakh gut biomes, tells me that diversity in the gut biome is a key indicator of gut health. And people who include millet in their diet have a more diverse gut biome.
In a country battling multiple inflammatory disease-causing epidemics, not mainstreaming millets in public distribution is mind-boggling.
Now, what about planetary health?
The way millets feed – the way they take up carbon from the air – is what makes them much more effective than rice or wheat in hot climates.
Biochemistry is fascinating and important, worth considering in detail, so let’s leave its details for another day. Instead, let’s turn to an interesting study in arid northern China, where researchers grew foxtail millet by providing varying amounts of water and found that not only did the millet produce more grain for each ounce of water consumed (relative to rice or wheat), but in warmer conditions, the plants more efficiently pulled moisture from the soil to replenish their seeds.
Although, on paper, the water footprint in millet may seem comparable – sometimes even higher than that of rice, these comparisons underestimate irrigated rice grown on prime land compared to rain-fed millet cultivated on marginal soils. This is not a fair fight. In marginal lands, in dry areas, in hot climates, millet easily wins. And these are exactly the kinds of places where farmers have switched from millet to rice (or wheat), often because borewells have made more water accessible. And because water is (is) used unwisely, it is running out. And as the climate gets warmer, yields are being affected.
This is the classic story of the grasshopper and the ant with a twist. Like the locust, farmers living in dry lands grew crops beyond their capacity because that was what sold the most. Along the way, some lost their (groundwater) insurance. And now, winter, or rather the warmer and more temperamental season, has come, and like grasshoppers, they need to rely on the kindness of others. This is where millet comes in.
The good news is that the government is starting to include millets in public distribution, even though it currently remains a drop in the ocean of grain procurement.
The real hurdle lies elsewhere. When I see the health craze surrounding quinoa becoming popular, I admit my eyes roll. Yes, quinoa is a powerhouse of nutrition. But it originated in the Andes and likes cool climates. Millet compares nutritionally to quinoa, and is ideally suited to the Indian climate.
The bottleneck is not climate or economics; It’s the most human thing: the situation. We are attracted to the good kids (rice and quinoa) and look down on the socially less good kids (millet). Historically, millet was the food of vulnerable groups and, in our class-divided society, why would we eat what people standing several rungs below us on the socio-economic ladder eat?
There is a good sense of irony in life.
So, in the spirit of keeping my food in line with my words, I started making and eating ragi (finger millet) kanji, or porridge. I’ve been feeling a little unwell the past weeks and needed a pick-me-up. There was more than a touch of old memories in this action. Part of my mother’s family is from Karnataka, which means summer holidays involve ragi – or as we call it, “ragi balls”. Since the family dog also liked them, my grandfather, who was not much concerned with his grandchildren, lovingly fed the dog Moni from his hand, while I sat beside him on the red cement floor and silently ate my share.
The grains have to be soaked overnight before grinding. In the morning, I placed some grains of rice in an earthen pot with some water, and brought the water to a boil before adding the millet. Then came the phase of continuously stirring the pot until the grains were cooked. I took the pot off the flame, covered it with a cloth and walked away. A few hours later, I added tadka (curry leaves, mustard seeds, two red chillies and urad dal in ghee), salt, some curd and ate. It wasn’t like one of Getafix’s potions, and I didn’t immediately finish the article. But it was soothing and gentle, and after some time, my headache subsided a little, and after a day, my stomach felt better, and I felt better. The real proof, in a few weeks, if I stick with it, will be a test to see if my gut biome has changed.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watersheds. She can be reached at tradeoffs@climateaction.net. Views expressed are personal)
