"Millets should Find a Place on the Food Plate": Narendra Tomar

The Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare, as a chief guest at the Agricultural leadership and Global Nutrition Conclave, promoted the imperative of restoring millets as an important part of everyday diet around the world.

Tomar specified that Millets deserve a respectable place on the food plate alongside wheat and rice. The aim is to restore millet as a nutri-cereal under Indian direction during the International Millet Year of 2023. The UN declared 2023 as the International Year of Millets on the suggestion of India, as India overtook the initiative to revive and promote millets throughout the year.

As the pandemic raised the gravity on the value of good health, including millet in diet would not only boost nutritional health but would also be instrumental in generating supplementary employment and bolster the economy that also took a hit during Covid. Hence, celebrating the IMY would aid to increase domestic as well as international consumption of millets, stated Tomar.

He also added that Indian tradition and culture has been blessed with a bounty of resources to live a happy and healthy life, but for the sake of modernism, it gets lost in momentum. Multiple products, even now, grow naturally without any human interference whereas humans buy a lot of them for expensive rates. Promotion of traditional grains would be in harmony with nature’s bounty. 

Millets are an age-old commodity in Indian agricultural practice; hence even with less facilities they were able to grow a surplus of grains. But due to market competition, farmers had to switch to a more profit earning farming practice, producing more commercial grains and slowly traditional food grains dropped off the map. Nonetheless, as the Indian agrarian society is producing a surplus of commercial grains, it is time to go back to millet cultivation as more research has proved the necessity of nutri-grains to be imperative for good health, conveyed the Union Minister.

The 1st Global Nutrition Conclave was organized in coherence with the 13th Agricultural Leadership Conclave in New Delhi on the 13th and 14th of December. The conclave hosted many dignitaries and stakeholders concerning the agricultural sector, where Mr. William Dar, former Agriculture Minister of the Philippines was also present.