PRESERVATION OF TRADITIONAL SEED VARIETIES IN INDIA

Post date : 16 June 2015

AGRICULTURE & BIODIVERSITY
Syllabus: GS3 – Agriculture, Environment & Biodiversity

🌀 Thematic Focus

Seed Sovereignty | Community Seed Banks | Biodiversity & Traditional Knowledge

🌱 Intro Whisper

Every seed is a memory. A memory of the soil, the sky, and the seasons that nurtured it. When traditional seeds disappear, we lose not just food — but stories, songs, and the silent science of survival.

🌾 Key Highlights

• CSE Report Sparks Concern: The Centre for Science and Environment flagged the sharp decline in community-based seed conservation and intergenerational transfer of seed knowledge across India.
• Traditional Seeds Offer Resilience: These seeds are open-pollinated, chemical-free, and better suited for climate uncertainties like droughts and cloudbursts — unlike hybrids which demand repeat purchases and chemical inputs.
• Community Seed Banks (CSBs): Farmers borrow seeds and return double after harvest. Despite their ecological value, CSBs lack policy support and are often run without formal recognition.
• Cultural Practices at Risk: Rituals like Rotiyaana in Uttarakhand are fading, and familial knowledge-sharing is weakening. The risk of biopiracy looms large due to poor documentation.

🧭 Concept Explainer

Reviving Seed Sovereignty in India

• Ecological Balance: Systems like Barah Anaj (12 grains cultivation) in Uttarakhand or millet-diversity blocks in Karnataka ensure biodiversity, pest resistance, and food security.
• Grassroots Champions: From Nagaland’s women-led seed banks to Odisha’s forest-farming synergy, local communities are defending India’s agro-diversity silently and sustainably.
• Legal Gaps: The Seed Bill 2019 is pending, and even the PPVFRA Act has failed to protect “common knowledge” varieties from private capture.
• Youth & Women as Custodians: Initiatives like Participatory Variety Selection (PVS) and Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch festivals are re-engaging youth in seed-saving traditions. Women continue to lead on-ground seed storage using neem-treated bamboo baskets.

🗺️ GS Paper Mapping

• GS3 → Agriculture: Traditional knowledge, seed banks, farm diversity
• GS3 → Environment & Biodiversity: In-situ conservation, agro-ecology
• GS2 → Governance: Policy Gaps in agricultural legislation

🪔 A Thought Spark — by IAS Monk

A seed saved is a civilization saved. In every tiny kernel rests the heritage of a people, the patience of a farmer, and the promise of tomorrow. Lose that — and you lose more than agriculture; you lose ancestry.

High Quality Mains Essay For Practice :

Word Limit 1000-1200

Seeds of Memory, Roots of Sovereignty: Reclaiming India’s Traditional Seed Heritage

In a world obsessed with speed, yield, and uniformity, a quiet revolution lies buried beneath the soil — in a seed, ancient and unassuming. India, with its bewildering diversity of languages, landscapes, and lifestyles, is also a cradle of agricultural biodiversity. For millennia, Indian farmers nurtured thousands of seed varieties — millet that grew in the shadows of monsoon clouds, pulses that danced with the desert wind, rice that remembered the rhythm of the floods. These traditional seeds were not just units of production; they were woven into the food habits, festivals, and spiritual cosmologies of entire communities.

Yet, as the march of modernity deepens its furrows across the subcontinent, these ancient seeds are vanishing — quietly, swiftly, almost irreversibly. The recent report by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) shines a spotlight on this slow erosion, revealing how community seed banks (CSBs), once the heartbeats of rural resilience, are now fighting for survival in a world increasingly dominated by corporate hybrids and monocultures.

The Genetic Memory of a Civilization

Traditional seeds are more than germplasm — they are living memory. Their genes store the collective experience of climate fluctuations, pest pressures, soil responses, and farming practices honed over centuries. Unlike modern hybrid seeds, which are often one-season wonders, traditional varieties are open-pollinated, can be saved and reused, and evolve with their agro-ecological environments.

For instance, the Barah Anaj system of Uttarakhand, where twelve crops are grown together, creates a self-sustaining ecosystem: some plants fix nitrogen, others deter pests, and still others provide food security in case of erratic weather. Similarly, in the Niyamgiri foothills of Odisha, tribal farmers continue to grow dozens of millet varieties alongside herbs and vegetables, preserving not only nutrition but also cultural dignity.

But these systems are being displaced. Farmers, especially younger ones, are switching to commercial seeds — drawn by the lure of higher yields, shorter maturity periods, and government procurement schemes. Unfortunately, these hybrids demand chemical inputs, irrigation, and external dependence. They are fragile in the face of climate shocks, and worst of all, they destroy the seed sovereignty that was once the soul of Indian agriculture.

The Vanishing Community Seed Bank

Community Seed Banks (CSBs) have historically allowed farmers to borrow traditional seeds and return twice the quantity post-harvest, thus creating a self-replicating circle of abundance. They thrive especially in remote tribal regions, where formal market penetration is weak and agro-climatic variability is high.

Today, however, CSBs operate in an administrative vacuum. There is no formal legal framework or state-supported financial backing. The Seed Bill 2019, still pending in Parliament, makes no provision for integrating these grassroots efforts into mainstream agricultural planning. Most CSBs run on the strength of NGOs, SHGs, and the quiet heroism of elder women — who store seeds in clay pots lined with neem leaves, protecting biodiversity without the vocabulary of science.

In Nagaland’s Chizami village, women have turned seed banking into a rite of resistance, blending training with tradition. In Karnataka’s Teeratha, youth participate in Participatory Variety Selection (PVS) trials, testing traditional millet strains for resilience. But such initiatives, though inspiring, remain scattered and unsupported.

Erosion of Knowledge, Exploitation of Rights

The most tragic dimension of seed loss is the intergenerational rupture in knowledge transfer. In earlier generations, children grew up watching their grandmothers select, dry, store, and sow seeds. Songs, taboos, and rituals regulated these processes. Today, those rhythms are breaking. The Rotiyaana ritual of Uttarakhand, where seeds were blessed before sowing, is rarely performed. Youth find little appeal in the “slow science” of indigenous farming.

This cultural disinterest is worsened by legal loopholes. While India has a Protection of Plant Varieties and Farmers’ Rights Act (PPVFRA) — one of the few in the world that acknowledges farmers as breeders — implementation is patchy. Documentation of “common knowledge” varieties is weak, creating space for biopiracy. There have been instances where companies attempted to register traditional varieties as proprietary, simply because no formal record existed.

In the race to patent, the farmer becomes invisible. And without legal support or documentation, a community’s heritage becomes a corporation’s asset.

Traditional Seeds and Climate Resilience

India is one of the countries most vulnerable to climate change. Heatwaves, untimely rains, prolonged droughts, and flash floods are no longer exceptions but patterns. In this context, traditional seeds offer the first line of defence.

Unlike standardized hybrids that fail catastrophically under stress, traditional varieties display genetic plasticity. In a mixed cropping system, if one variety fails, others compensate. This built-in diversity is the ecological equivalent of a financial safety net.

Studies have shown that in Rajasthan, traditional pearl millet (bajra) varieties outperform hybrids during droughts. In Assam’s floodplains, deepwater rice survives inundation better than any laboratory-grown seed. Ignoring these assets in climate planning is like abandoning a boat before a storm.

The Way Forward — Policies Rooted in People

To reverse this loss and re-anchor India’s seed future in its past, multiple steps must converge:

1. Legal Integration:
   Fast-track the documentation of traditional varieties under PPVFRA. Create open-access seed registers maintained by local panchayats or CSBs. Recognize community ownership of seed knowledge to prevent corporate appropriation.
2. Support Community Seed Banks:
   Develop a cluster model (1 CSB per 100–200 villages) with funding under existing schemes like RKVY or PM-KISAN. Ensure women and youth representation in CSB management.
3. Incentivize Youth:
   Launch National Seed Saver Fellowships. Offer skill training in organic farming and seed processing. Integrate seed-saving modules into agricultural universities and rural schools.
4. Celebrate Culture:
   Use festivals, folk songs, and food fairs to revive lost seed traditions. The Bharat Beej Swaraj Manch (BBSM) already organizes seed festivals across urban India. This momentum must be supported by the state and civil society.
5. Link to Agri-Markets:
   Promote Geographical Indication (GI) tagging of heritage seeds. Offer MSP or bonus incentives for farmers cultivating indigenous varieties, especially millets during the International Millet Mission.
6. Decentralized In-Situ Conservation:
   Encourage in-situ preservation in farms and forests. Conservation is strongest not in seed banks or gene vaults, but in living soil and rotating hands.

A Philosophical Reflection

The seed is not just a genetic unit. It is a cultural object, a political question, and a spiritual metaphor. Gandhi once said, “To forget how to dig the earth and to tend the soil is to forget ourselves.” In losing traditional seeds, we risk forgetting who we are — a civilization that understood diversity not as an obstacle but as a blessing.

If modern agriculture is a war against nature — with its chemicals, monocultures, and mechanization — then traditional seed saving is a negotiation with nature, full of respect, patience, and humility.

India doesn’t need to reject science. It needs to redefine science — to include the quiet experimentation of tribal farmers, the observational wisdom of mountain women, the rituals of seed exchange in village haats. That is science too — slow, oral, unrecorded, but no less real.

Conclusion

The story of India’s seed loss is not just agricultural. It is economic, cultural, ecological, and ethical. If we lose these seeds, we lose our ability to adapt, to resist, to regenerate. But if we revive them, we may just find a way to farm the future with the wisdom of the past.

In the end, every traditional seed is a question India must answer:
Do we want to grow food — or merely commodities?
Do we want self-reliance — or perpetual dependence?
Do we want agriculture rooted in market logic — or in memory, meaning, and mutuality?

The choice, like the seed, is in our hands.

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