How the Green Revolution Nearly Destroyed India’s Millet Culture — and Why It’s Coming Back

In 1961, millets occupied 36.9 million hectares of cultivated land in India — more than any other grain category. By 2015, that had fallen to 14.7 million hectares. In fifty years, India had abandoned 22 million hectares of millet cultivation — an area larger than the United Kingdom.

This is the story of how it happened, who made it happen, why it seemed like the right decision at the time, and why India is now reversing course.

The World India Was Trying to Escape (1947–1965)

To understand the Green Revolution, you need to understand the hunger India faced at independence.

Between 1943 and 1944, the Bengal Famine killed an estimated 2–3 million people. In 1966–67, India required emergency food aid from the United States — 11 million tonnes of wheat under the PL-480 programme — to avoid mass starvation after back-to-back monsoon failures.

Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s government was genuinely terrified of famine. The political stakes of food insecurity were existential. When American agronomist Norman Borlaug — who would win the Nobel Peace Prize in 1970 — offered high-yield dwarf wheat varieties that could triple production, India embraced them with both hands.

The same logic applied to rice: International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in the Philippines developed IR-8 — the “miracle rice” — which yielded 8–10 tonnes per hectare versus 1–2 tonnes for traditional varieties.

The math was simple: India was starving. These varieties produced vastly more food per acre. Adopting them was not a failure of wisdom — it was a desperate response to a real crisis.

The Architecture of Abandonment

What happened to millets was not a single decision — it was the aggregate effect of dozens of policies, each individually reasonable, that together dismantled four millennia of millet culture.

1. The Procurement Monopoly

The Food Corporation of India (FCI), established 1965, was tasked with national food security. It built procurement infrastructure — warehouses, mandi networks, support prices — overwhelmingly for wheat and rice.

If you were a farmer in Maharashtra in 1970 with 2 acres, the choice was stark:

Grow jowar: sell to local traders at uncertain prices; no government floor price; no FCI warehouse
Grow IR-8 rice (if you had irrigation): guaranteed government purchase at minimum support price (MSP); FCI truck comes to your field

Rational farmers chose rice and wheat. Not because they didn’t value jowar — but because the economic incentives left them no choice.

2. The Public Distribution System

The PDS — India’s food subsidy system — distributed wheat and rice to hundreds of millions of families at subsidised prices. Millets received no PDS allocation.

The effect: urban families who had eaten jowar and bajra for generations switched to government-subsidised wheat and rice because it was cheaper. By the 1990s, entire generations of urban Indians had grown up without ever eating a millet-based meal.

3. The Irrigation Imperative

High-yield rice and wheat varieties require substantial water. The government invested massively in irrigation infrastructure — dams, canals, groundwater pumping — all calibrated for rice and wheat cultivation.

Millets, which need 80% less water than rice, were framed as “dry land crops” — a subtle stigmatisation. “Dry land” became synonymous with “poor farmer” and “inferior grain.” The narrative that millets were “famine food” — what people ate when there was no rice — took hold and persisted for decades.

4. Agricultural Research Redirection

Research funding, agricultural university curricula, and extension services pivoted to rice and wheat. Millet breeders, always fewer in number, saw their budgets cut. The All India Coordinated Research Project on Millets — the primary millet breeding programme — was systematically underfunded relative to rice and wheat equivalents.

The Hidden Costs — What India Lost

The Green Revolution delivered its core promise: India achieved food grain self-sufficiency by the mid-1970s and has been a net exporter of food grains since 2003. Those were genuine achievements.

But the costs were:

Nutritional regression

White rice (GI 73, 0.4g fibre) replaced jowar (GI 62, 6.7g fibre), ragi (344mg calcium), and bajra (8mg iron). India’s nutritional profile deteriorated even as caloric intake increased. The epidemiological shift toward Type 2 diabetes, obesity, and micronutrient deficiency coincides almost precisely with the millet-to-rice-wheat transition.

The World Health Organization’s 2016 Global Report on Diabetes named India as having the highest absolute number of diabetic adults globally. Nutritional epidemiologists argue the millet abandonment was a significant contributing factor.

Groundwater catastrophe

Rice cultivation in Punjab, Haryana, and UP — states not naturally suited to it — has depleted groundwater tables catastrophically. Punjab’s water table has fallen by 1 metre per year in some districts. The Central Ground Water Board estimates Punjab’s groundwater will be critically depleted by 2039.

Had the same area remained under bajra and jowar cultivation (both rain-fed, low-water crops), this crisis would not exist in its current form.

Biodiversity collapse

India once had over 5,000 millet varieties. The shift to a handful of high-yield varieties of rice and wheat has wiped out much of this genetic diversity — and with it, drought adaptations, nutritional profiles, and climate resilience that took thousands of years of farmer selection to develop.

Cultural loss

Jowar bhakri in Maharashtra. Bajra roti in Rajasthan. Ragi mudde in Karnataka. Kambu koozhu in Tamil Nadu. These were not just foods — they were cultural identities, seasonal rhythms, community practices. A generation grew up calling these foods “poor people’s food” and aspiring to eat what was on the PDS: rice and wheat.

The Turning Point (2015–2023)

The reversal began quietly, driven by three converging forces:

1. The diabetes epidemic

India’s 101 million diabetics (2023) created a massive consumer base motivated to change dietary patterns. When nutritionists pointed to low-GI millets as the most historically appropriate, culturally rooted dietary solution, urban middle-class consumers listened.

2. Climate change awareness

As water tables fell and monsoon patterns became unpredictable, the extreme water efficiency of millets (350 litres per kg grain vs 3,500 litres for rice) attracted the attention of policy planners, climate scientists, and farmers facing groundwater depletion.

3. Political will — Shree Anna

On February 1, 2023, Finance Minister Nirmala Sitharaman coined the phrase “Shree Anna” in the Union Budget speech, elevating millets to India’s national grain identity. Prime Minister Modi followed with the term’s full articulation at the Global Millets Conference, attended by delegates from 102 nations.

The UN’s declaration of 2023 as the International Year of Millets — proposed by India — globalised the narrative. Indian millets suddenly had premium export positioning, media attention, and policy backing that had been absent for 60 years.

That global attention didn’t end with the year itself. ICRISAT and the FAO held a formal closing event for IYM2023 at FAO headquarters in Rome on 29 March 2024, held the same week as the Global South Millet Convening in Dubai — where millet-producing nations discussed turning a single symbolic year into a standing international coalition, including proposals for regional Centres of Excellence for Millets.

Where We Are Now (2025)

India produced 180.15 lakh tonnes of millets in 2024–25 — rising, not falling
Over 500 startups are operating in the Shree Anna value chain
Per-capita millet consumption has risen from 2–3 kg/month to 14 kg/month
₹8,000+ crore in government schemes specifically for millet promotion
IIMR Hyderabad designated as Global Centre of Excellence for Millets
Millet cafes, millet restaurants, millet products in every major supermarket
The PDS is now being reformed to include millets in select states

The trajectory has reversed. Whether it sustains depends on whether the consumer experience of eating millets — in restaurants, in packaged products, in home cooking — is good enough to compete with the convenience and familiarity of rice and wheat.

That is the work of the next decade.

How the Green Revolution Nearly Destroyed India's Millet Culture