Millets Need More Than Just Celebration. They Need a Value Chain
The International Year of Millets may have ended, but the real challenge for India’s millet story is only beginning.
Over the past few years, millets have moved from being viewed as “coarse cereals” to becoming a national priority. Governments are promoting their cultivation, nutritionists are celebrating their health benefits, and consumers are increasingly embracing them as superfoods. India, after all, is already the world’s largest producer of millets, contributing 18.1% of global production in 2023–24.
The renewed attention is no coincidence, as millets have the potential to address some of India’s most pressing nutritional and environmental challenges simultaneously. Rich in calcium, iron, zinc and dietary fibre, they can help combat the rising burden of diabetes, obesity and cardiovascular diseases. Unlike paddy, which typically takes 100–140 days to mature and depends on intensive irrigation, fertilisers and pesticides, most millets mature within 60–90 days, thrive in high temperatures and poor soils, and require far less water while generating a much smaller carbon footprint.
Few crops offer such a compelling combination of nutritional, environmental and economic promise. Yet growing a better crop is only half the challenge. The larger question is whether India has built the economic ecosystem needed to make millets a profitable choice for farmers. Can farmers sustainably grow what markets are not yet equipped to absorb?
Before the Green Revolution, millets occupied an area comparable to rice and wheat. Their subsequent decline was driven not by any inherent disadvantage, but by the rise of an economic ecosystem supporting rice and wheat through high-yielding seed varieties, irrigation, mechanisation, procurement, processing infrastructure, public distribution and assured markets. This reaffirmed that farmers follow incentives, not sentiments.
Recognising this lesson, India is once again placing millets at the centre of its agricultural strategy. Their promotion under the National Food Security Mission and Poshan Abhiyaan, alongside sustained investments in research and processing, reflects their shift from niche crops to strategic ones. According to the Indian Institute of Millets Research, funding agencies such as the NFSM, APEDA, Ministry of Food Processing Industries and the Department of Agriculture and Farmers’ Welfare have cumulatively granted INR 227.29 million (USD 2.73 million) for research and development of millet production and processing, since 2009. These investments are fructifying as India produced 11.85 million tonnes of millet, covering a total area of 84.88 lakh hectares in 2022. But producing more grain is only the first step. The larger challenge is converting production into farmer incomes.
That challenge is fundamentally economic as much as agricultural. Simply producing more grain creates little value unless it can be efficiently processed, marketed, transported and sold. A competitive value chain is what converts production into prosperity. That requires specialised machinery, efficient processing technologies, reliable supplies of quality raw material, strong consumer demand, and globally competitive supply chains capable of serving a market expected to exceed USD 14 billion at a compound annual growth rate of 4.6% between 2019 and 2027. From this perspective, millets represent not merely an agricultural opportunity but a business opportunity spanning food processing, retail, exports, nutrition and rural enterprise. Capturing that opportunity requires a value chain that is as robust as the crop itself.
Without these links, higher production could lead to oversupply, translating into lower farm-gate prices instead of higher farmer incomes.
India’s paddy-growing regions illustrate precisely why value chains matter. Punjab and Haryana continue to cultivate water-intensive paddy despite mounting ecological stress because paddy is embedded within a resilient value chain. Farmers receive subsidised inputs, assured procurement, established processing infrastructure and predictable markets. While millets offer environmental advantages, they do not yet offer the same economic certainty.
The answer is not to recreate the paddy ecosystem of input-intensive incentives that has contributed to groundwater depletion and soil degradation. It is to build a market-led millet ecosystem where investment in processing, storage, branding, market linkages and consumer demand make millet cultivation genuinely remunerative for farmers. Until that ecosystem is in place, diversification will remain easier to announce than to implement.
The good news is that such a transition need not come at a higher fiscal cost. A study by the Institute for Competitiveness, A Pathway to Doubling Farmers’ Income: Reducing Reliance on Paddy Production and Incentivising Millet Production in Indian Agriculture, proposes redesigning the input subsidies and procurement expenditure currently directed towards paddy into a Soil Rejuvenation Allowance that rewards ecological outcomes. Such incentives may encourage farmers to sow millets, but only a strong value chain will persuade them to keep doing so.
According to the National Academy of Agricultural Sciences, mechanisation, processing infrastructure, storage, branding, credit, market linkages and export promotion should become as integral to millet policy as seed development and production targets. Only then will farmers capture value beyond the farm gate through processing and value addition rather than remaining suppliers of raw grain. Only then will millets become not just climate-smart crops, but commercially viable ones.
India’s agricultural successes have never been built on production alone, but on ecosystems connecting research, markets, infrastructure and policy into a single economic engine. The Green Revolution succeeded because policy made rice and wheat commercially viable across the entire value chain, from seed to shelf. Millets now require the same ecosystem approach.
Ultimately, the future of millets will not be decided by how many hectares are cultivated or how many tonnes are harvested, but by whether every kilogram produced creates value across the entire value chain. The next chapter of India’s millet story therefore depends not simply on growing more millets, but on building the integrated value chain that transforms them into a lasting source of farmer prosperity and agricultural growth.
(Amit Kapoor is chair & Ananya Khurana, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Competitiveness. X: @kautiliya).
The article was published with Financial Express on July 4, 2026.
