‘How will ragi grow in this heat’

Nagaraj Bandan remembers the smell of ragi kali cooking in his home. As a little boy, he would look forward to it everyday. 

Five decades later the ragi kali (a dish made with ragi flour) no longer matches up. “The ragi we get now doesn’t smell or taste as good as it used to,” he says and adds that ragi kali is made only once in a while now.

Nagaraj is an Irula (listed as a Scheduled Tribe in Tamil Nadu) and a resident of Bokkapuram hamlet in the Nilgiris. He grew up around ragi and other millets that his parents cultivated such as ragi (finger millet), cholam (sorghum), kamboo (pearl millet) and samai (little millet). A few kilos were always kept aside for the family’s consumption, the rest was for the market.

When an adult Nagaraj took over the farm, he noticed that the yield was significantly lower than what his father would get: “We only get enough [ragi] to eat, and sometimes not even that,” he told PARI. He continues to grow ragi, intercropping it with vegetables like beans and brinjal on the two-acre plot.

Other farmers have also noticed the change. Mari (only uses his first name) says his father used to get 10-20 sacks of ragi. But the 45-year-old farmer says he gets only 2-3 sacks now from his two acres.

Nagaraj and Mari’s experiences are reflected in official figures showing that ragi cultivation in the Nilgiris has plummeted from 1,369 hectares in 1948-49 to 86 hectares in 1998-99. 

The last census (2011) says that millet cultivation occupies only a single hectare in the district.

“I didn’t get any ragi last year,” says Nagaraj, talking about the seeds he had sown in June 2023. “It rained before I sowed the seeds but not after, then the seeds dried up.”

Another Irula farmer Suresh says ragi plants grow more slowly now that they are using new seeds. “We can’t rely on agriculture anymore,” he says, and his two sons have left farming and work as daily wage labourers in Coimbatore.

Rain patterns have become more erratic. “Earlier it used to rain for six months [end of May to early October]. But now we can’t predict when it will rain; it can rain in December also,” says Nagaraj, who blames the poor returns on lack of rain and adds. “We can’t depend on the rain anymore.”

The Nilgiri Biosphere Reserve lies in the southern part of the Western Ghats and is recognised by UNESCO as an area of rich biodiversity. But the introduction of non-native species of plants, converting high altitude swamps into plantations, and the cultivation of tea during Colonial times have “come at the expense of the biodiversity of the region’s biodiversity,” says this 2011 paper by the Western Ghats Ecology Panel.

Other sources of water in the Nilgiris like the Moyar river are too far away. And since his land lies in Bokkapuram – buffer zone of the Mudumalai Tiger Reserve – forest officials do not allow borewells. B. Siddan, also a farmer from Bokkapuram, says that many things have changed since the Forest Rights Act, 2006. “Before 2006 we could take water from the forest but now we aren’t even allowed inside the forest,” the 47-year-old says.

“How will ragi grow in this heat,” asks Nagaraj.

To offset his losses on the land and earn a living, Nagaraj is a daily wage worker in other farms in and around hamlets of Masinagudi. “I can earn anywhere between 400-500 [rupees] in a day, but that is when I get some work,” he says. His wife, Nagi is also a daily wage worker, and like many women in the district, works in nearby tea plantations and earns Rs. 300 a day.

The farmers joke that elephants seem to like ragi as much as they do. “The smell of ragi draws them [elephants] into our farms,” says Suresh. Bokkapuram hamlet falls under the Sigur elephant corridor – which connects movement of elephants between western and eastern ghats.

They don’t remember elephants coming to their farms this often when they were young. “We don’t blame the elephants though,” says Suresh and adds, “there is no rain so the forests are drying up. What will the elephants eat? They are forced to leave their forests to find food.” According to Global Forest Watch, the Nilgiris district lost 511 ha of forest land between 2002 to 2022.

Rangaiyya’s farm is in Melbhoothanatham, a hamlet few kilometres away from Bokkapuram but he agrees with Suresh. In his fifties, he farms on one acre land but he doesn’t have patta for it. “My family has farmed on this land even before 1947,” he says. A Soliga Adivasi, Rangaiyya also manages a Soliga temple near his land.

Rangaiyya had stopped cultivating ragi and other millets for a few years because of the elephants. “They [elephants] used to come and eat everything,” he says, and adds, “once the elephant comes into the farm and tastes the ragi, it keeps coming back again and again.” He says that many farmers have stopped growing ragi and other millets because of that. Rangaiyya started growing vegetables like cabbage, and beans instead. 

He adds that farmers have to stay guard overnight, and are scared of being harmed by the elephants if they fall asleep by mistake. “Farmers don’t sow ragi because they are scared of the elephants.”

The farmer says that they have never bought millets like ragi from the market and ate what they grew. So as they stopped growing them, they stopped eating them.

A local NGO provided him and other farmers with solar fences for their farms to protect them from elephants and other animals. Rangaiyya started farming ragi again on one half of his farm, on the other he continues to farm vegetables. In the last season, he earned Rs. 7,000 for the beans and garlic he sold in the market.

Declining millet farming has meant changing eating habits. “Once cultivation of millets went down, we had to buy food from the ration shops – something we weren’t used to,” says Lalitha Mukasami, a resident and a health field coordinator for a local NGO. She adds that the ration shops mostly sold rice and wheat.

“When I was a child, we used to eat ragi kali three times a day, but now we hardly eat it. We only have arsi sapat [rice-based food] which is also easier to make,” says Lalitha. From the Irula Adivasi community herself, she is from Anaikatti village and has been working with the community since the last 19 years. She says that the increase in health issues could be because of changing eating habits.

The Indian Institute of Millets Research (IIMR) in a report say, “Some of the known nutrients, vitamins, minerals, essential fatty acids also have benefits in terms of prevention of degenerative diseases besides their known functions of preventing nutritional deficiency diseases.” The Telangana-based institute is part of the Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR).

“Ragi and thenai used to be a staple. We used to eat them along with mustard leaves and kaat keerai [spinach found in the forest],” Rangaiyya says. He doesn’t remember the last time he ate this: “We don’t go into the forest at all now.”