Deccan Development Society wants millets in manifesto of parties

​Hyderabad: Stating that the role of millets would be important in providing food security for the poor in future, the Deccan Development Society (DDS) on Monday demanded the political parties to consider millets as important aspect while preparing manifestos.

The Deccan Development Society Director P V Satish said it was a welcome move that all political parties were addressing the issue of food and agriculture as important concern of their party. He said more and more commercial crops like cotton and sugar cane were occupying the small space that used to grow food crops in general and millets in particular. The impact of this extremely horrifying even imagination, said Satish. 

Satish said millets offer the highest level of nutrition, historically Telangana feeds millets but wrong policies have led to pursue low nutritional and high-water intake crops like rice in the recent years. The political parties should say that they would provide fixed quantity of millets for every ration card holder in the State. 

The DDS wanted the parties to provide incentives to grow millets including bonus for affordable and accessible nutrition that the millet farmer provides to the population, bonus for the water saved agriculture by growing millet crops, bonus for hosting climate resilient crops, for nurturing less fertile lands and producing food and nutrition for the population etc. The DDS further said the organic millet production would also drastically reduce the chemical pollution in soil and in air. Thereby largely improve the quality of life for common citizens. 

Satish said that every year the millet markets have been expanding under an increasing demand from urban consumers who are completely fed up with the toxic food that was supplied to them.  “Following this trend we must respond to this consumer demand and put more and more millets into the market which is produced by local farmers. This will contribute significantly to the emergence of large number of ecologically sensitive consumers,” said Satish.