Why Millets Disappeared From Indian Plates — And Why They're Coming Back

In This Article

The Story in Brief

In 1960, India's per capita millet consumption was 33kg per year. By 2020, it had fallen to 4kg per year — an 88% collapse
The Green Revolution (1960s–70s) focused exclusively on wheat and rice — no high-yielding millet varieties were developed for PDS
PDS (Public Distribution System) distributed only wheat and rice — millets were never subsidised for the poor
White rice became a social status symbol: eating millets was associated with poverty; eating white rice with prosperity
The UN declared 2023 the International Year of Millets, partly at India's initiative — marking a global policy reversal
The disappearance of millets was entirely policy-driven. The grains were never nutritionally inferior — they were politically de-prioritised

The Millet Civilisation That Was

For most of Indian history — spanning at least 5,000 years — millets were the primary grains of the subcontinent. Archaeological evidence from Harappan sites (2600–1900 BCE) shows foxtail millet, barnyard millet, and little millet as staple crops. The Deccan Plateau — modern-day Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, and Maharashtra — was a millet civilisation.

Classical Tamil Sangam literature (300 BCE–300 CE) describes five landscape zones (tinai), each associated with a different grain — foxtail millet (thinai) gives its name to the kurinji landscape. Ragi (kelvaragu) is described as sustaining food for travellers. Jowar and bajra sustained the kingdoms of the Deccan and the Rajputana.

As late as 1960, India produced and consumed millets as primary dietary staples across the entire subcontinent except the riverine Indo-Gangetic plain (where wheat dominated) and coastal Bengal and Kerala (where rice dominated).

Then, in approximately 15 years, this 5,000-year grain culture largely collapsed.

The Green Revolution — Saving Lives, Changing Diets

The Problem in 1960

In the early 1960s, India faced genuine famine risk. The population was growing rapidly. Agricultural productivity was low. The 1965–66 Bihar famine killed thousands. The government was importing food under PL-480 (US food aid) — widely considered a national humiliation. Something drastic had to be done.

The Solution: High-Yielding Varieties of Wheat and Rice

Norman Borlaug’s semi-dwarf wheat varieties, introduced to Mexico in the 1940s, had transformed food production there. M.S. Swaminathan brought these varieties to India. New high-yielding rice varieties from the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) in Manila were introduced simultaneously.

Between 1966 and 1972, India scaled up these high-yielding wheat and rice varieties across Punjab, Haryana, and western Uttar Pradesh. Wheat production tripled. Rice production doubled. The famines stopped. Millions of lives were saved.

The Structural Decision That Changed Indian Diets

The Green Revolution was not just about seeds. It was backed by:

Irrigation investment — canals and tube wells in Punjab, Haryana, and the Green Revolution belt
Fertiliser subsidies — heavily subsidised urea and phosphate for wheat and rice farmers
Minimum Support Price (MSP) — guaranteed procurement of wheat and rice at fixed prices
PDS distribution — subsidised wheat and rice distributed to millions through ration shops

Millets received none of these. No high-yielding millet varieties were developed with the same urgency. No millet MSP was set at remunerative levels. No millets were included in PDS distribution. No irrigation was built for millet regions.

The policy message to Indian farmers was unambiguous: grow wheat and rice. The message to consumers was equally clear: wheat and rice are the grains the government considers important.

The Status Symbol Shift

White Rice as Prosperity

The cultural impact was as significant as the economic one. As PDS subsidies made wheat and rice cheaply and reliably available, a social association formed: eating white rice and wheat rotis meant you were not poor. Eating millets — ragi mudde, bajra roti, jowar bhakri — meant you had not been able to afford rice.

This is not a trivial psychological shift. Food is identity. In village after village across India, as families rose from subsistence poverty to lower-middle-class income, the first dietary change was to switch from ragi mudde to white rice. Mothers stopped making ragi ambali for babies and switched to commercial infant cereals. Children who grew up on ragi and jowar fed their own children rice and wheat.

The food researchers at ICRISAT documented this in the 1980s and 1990s: millet consumption was dropping faster than income growth alone could explain. Aspirational consumption was replacing nutritional logic.

The Restaurant and Wedding Effect

Urban food culture reinforced this. South Indian restaurants served white rice-based meals — idli, dosa (made from rice and urad), white rice with sambar. Weddings served white rice feasts. Street food was wheat-based — pav bhaji, paratha, bread.

Millets were absent from restaurants, street food, and celebratory meals — which meant they were associated only with home cooking and only with lower-income households. A generational shift followed: urban-born children in the 1980s and 1990s grew up with no millet exposure and no cooking knowledge.

The Nutritional Consequences

The health consequences of this shift emerged slowly and are still unfolding:

Type 2 Diabetes Epidemic

India today has approximately 101 million people with diabetes — the largest absolute diabetic population in the world. The shift from low-GI millets (GI 50–65) to high-GI white rice (GI 72) and refined wheat products (GI 75–85) is a significant contributing factor. White rice as a dietary staple is now recognised as a risk factor for Type 2 diabetes in multiple large Asian cohort studies.

Iron Deficiency Anaemia

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5, 2019–21) found that 57% of Indian women aged 15–49 are anaemic. Millets — barnyard millet (15.2mg iron/100g), little millet (9.3mg), bajra (8mg) — are dramatically richer in iron than white rice (0.7mg). The replacement of iron-rich millets with iron-poor white rice over two generations directly contributed to this anaemia burden.

Fibre Deficiency and Gut Disease

White rice has 0.2g fibre per 100g. Traditional millet-based diets provided 8–12g fibre per 100g of grain. The transition to white rice dramatically reduced dietary fibre intake, contributing to constipation, colorectal cancer risk, and impaired gut microbiome diversity.

Why Millets Are Coming Back

2023 — International Year of Millets

The single most significant policy development was the United Nations declaring 2023 the International Year of Millets (IYoM). This was championed by India — Prime Minister Modi raised the proposal at the UN. The declaration brought unprecedented global attention to millets and created institutional pressure for policy change.

During IYoM 2023:

ICRISAT (International Crops Research Institute for the Semi-Arid Tropics) ran a global millet promotion campaign
India hosted the G20, and millets featured prominently in state dinner menus
Indian Railways added millet-based items to station food menus
Indian Air Force, Army, and government canteens added millet-based items to menus

POSHAN Abhiyaan and Millet Inclusion

The Indian government’s POSHAN (Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition) Abhiyaan 2.0 has begun incorporating millets into its Supplementary Nutrition Programme (SNP) — the take-home rations for children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers through Anganwadi centres.

In Karnataka, ragi-based fortified foods have been a part of the Integrated Child Development Service (ICDS) programme for many years — arguably the most successful millet inclusion policy in India.

Research and Clinical Validation

The 2000s–2020s saw a surge in peer-reviewed research on millets — glycaemic index studies, gut microbiome research, clinical trials in diabetics. This scientific validation gave millets nutritional credibility beyond traditional folklore, enabling health-conscious urban consumers to justify switching back to millets with evidence rather than nostalgia.

The Organic and Health Food Movement

The growth of organic food retail in India — driven by urban middle-class concern about pesticide residues, processed food chemicals, and lifestyle diseases — created a commercial channel for millets. Organic farms in Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Rajasthan, and Maharashtra found buyers willing to pay premium prices for traditional millet varieties.

Online grocery platforms, organic food subscription boxes, and D2C farm-to-consumer brands brought millets to urban doorsteps. Today, foxtail millet, ragi, jowar, and bajra are available on every major Indian e-commerce platform.

What Still Needs to Change

Despite progress, significant structural barriers remain:

PDS exclusion — millets are still not included in the national Public Distribution System food basket at meaningful scale. Wheat and rice remain subsidised staples for 800 million Indians through the Pradhan Mantri Garib Kalyan Anna Yojana (PMGKAY). Until millets enter PDS, they will remain aspirational foods for middle-class consumers, not accessible to the poor who need their nutrition most.
MSP gap — millet Minimum Support Prices (MSP) are set, but procurement by government agencies is minimal compared to wheat and rice. Farmers who grow millets for the market face price uncertainty.
Processing infrastructure — India has extensive wheat flour mills and rice mills but very limited millet processing infrastructure. Consumers want dehusked, clean, ready-to-cook millet grain — not grain that requires pre-processing at home. Building this infrastructure takes investment and time.
Recipe and cooking knowledge — an entire generation of urban Indians does not know how to cook millets. Recipe development, food education in schools, and celebrity chef endorsements are all needed to rebuild cooking knowledge.

India's Grain Consumption Shift Over Time (Per Capita Kg/Year)

Grain	1960s	1980s	2000s	2020s	Trend
All Millets	~33	~15	~8	~4	Down 88%
Rice (all types)	~45	~65	~75	~80	Up 78%
Wheat	~35	~55	~60	~65	Up 86%

Source: FAO Food Balance Sheets, NSSO surveys, Ministry of Agriculture data. Approximate figures.

The Conclusion

The disappearance of millets from Indian plates was not inevitable. It was not because millets taste bad (millions in Karnataka, Maharashtra, and Rajasthan still eat them daily and love them). It was not because millets are nutritionally inferior (the data in this article shows they are superior to white rice on almost every metric).

It was a policy decision. The government decided to subsidise wheat and rice, not millets. The market responded by producing more wheat and rice. Consumers adapted their preferences to what was cheap and available. Over two generations, millet knowledge and millet culture were nearly lost.

Reversing this requires both policy change (PDS inclusion, better MSP, processing infrastructure) and cultural change (rebuilding cooking knowledge, restaurant availability, recipe development). The 2023 International Year of Millets was a meaningful start. The direction is correct.

The individual choice — to include millets in your weekly meals — is both a nutritional choice and a small contribution to preserving India’s oldest grain cultures.

Did the Green Revolution cause the decline of millets?

The Green Revolution created the conditions for millet decline but was not the sole cause. The Revolution focused on wheat and rice because calorie security was the urgent priority in the 1960s — millets were harder to scale quickly with the technology of the time. The subsequent policy architecture (PDS, MSP, irrigation subsidies) that institutionalised wheat and rice at the expense of millets was the more direct cause of the long-term decline. The Green Revolution saved lives in the 1960s. The challenge is that its grain priorities were never updated when the food crisis ended.

Why were millets not included in the PDS?

Millets were not included in PDS primarily because they were not produced in the large, centralised, easily procured surpluses that wheat (Punjab, Haryana) and rice (Punjab, AP, Tamil Nadu) were. Millet cultivation was distributed across many small farms in dryland regions without organised government procurement infrastructure. Political economy also played a role — wheat and rice lobby interests were stronger in the states that dominated central government policy. The decision to build PDS around wheat and rice was also logistically sensible in the 1970s — the question is why it was never revisited.

Are millets becoming popular again?

Yes, genuinely. Millet sales in organic and health food segments have grown 3–5x in the 2015–2025 decade. The 2023 International Year of Millets created significant media attention. Government canteens, airlines, and railways have added millet items. Restaurants in Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad, and Mumbai now feature millet-based dishes. However, this growth is predominantly in the urban middle class. Millets have not yet re-entered the daily diet of the lower-income majority — that requires PDS inclusion and structural policy change.

What is POSHAN Abhiyaan and how does it relate to millets?

POSHAN Abhiyaan (Pradhan Mantri Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition) is India's flagship nutrition programme targeting malnutrition in children, pregnant women, and lactating mothers. POSHAN 2.0 has incorporated millets into the Supplementary Nutrition Programme (SNP) — the take-home food rations distributed through Anganwadi centres. This means millet-fortified food products are now being given to approximately 90 million beneficiaries. Karnataka has been a leader in this — ragi-based fortified food has been part of Karnataka's ICDS programme for decades and is a model for national scale-up.

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Disclaimer: This article is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult your doctor or a qualified healthcare provider before making dietary changes, especially if you have a medical condition.