Talk on Impacts of millet consumption on agriculture

Colloquium at the Azim Premji University, Post Graduate Campus, Electronic City, Bengaluru on Friday 16th Aug. 2019 @ 2 PM 

Consumption and production are interlinked processes – an increase in either can only be sustained if there is a corresponding increase in the other. There are multiple reasons to promote millet cultivation – its climate hardiness, low input demands, being conducive to multi-cropping, etc.. And there are many reasons to promote millet consumption – improved nutrition, diversifying carbohydrate sources, shortening food miles, etc. How have we as a society gone about promoting cereal grains earlier? What are the lessons we have learnt from this experience? How can this be used to help us come up with better ways to go about promoting millet production and consumption. What are the intended and expected outcomes from such an initiative?

In this talk, Dwiji shall share some of his experiences with different initiatives to promote millets, the initial impact they have been having on the farms and the farming communities, and how such initiatives could evolve to achieve better results on the ground.

About the speaker

Dwiji is an independent technology developer, sustainable food systems advocate and activist focused on sustainable solutions mostly in the agriculture and allied sectors. Since 2013, Dwiji has been studying, understanding and working towards improving millet cultivation practices, millet processing and cooking with millets.

Currently Dwiji is working on developing simple tools and machines to enable millet processing at a small scale with reduced drudgery and enhanced output. He is also a technical consultant with social enterprises and non profits (re)designing their millet processing set up. He is collaborating with creative teams to improve documentation of different aspects of millets and developing tutorials on millet processing and quality assessment.

Dwiji also works on popularizing and promoting millets by facilitating discussions, conducting workshops and giving talks on different aspects of millets from cultivation, through processing, preparation and consumption, in various fora. He also shares his learning by authoring online articles and blog posts. An ardent believer in learning till one dies, he rarely passes up on an opportunity to discuss and explore interesting questions in the areas of food, farming, sustainability or technology.