In the Nagaland village of Chizami, a community seed bank run by local women has preserved 156 traditional crop varieties, from rice with stems strong enough to survive monsoon winds to drought-tolerant maize, in a quiet effort to protect agricultural diversity as the region’s climate shifts.
The Chizami Community Seed Bank is managed by the Chizami Women Society with support from the Northeast Network, a regional non-profit. Khrowateu Akami, the society’s general secretary, said the bank was established because heirloom varieties were disappearing as farmers shifted toward higher-yielding commercial seed. “There is always a risk that some varieties could disappear forever,” she said. “So, we decided to preserve them ourselves.”
Rice, millet and maize built for Nagaland’s terrain
The bank’s holdings span more than 40 rice varieties, including Chizami Ru, Kechu Ru and Tura Ru, alongside sticky rice types, and traditional millets such as Menatshu, Ephekerhatsu and Kutsantshu, along with finger millet. Maize varieties include coloured and sticky types as well as a drought-tolerant puff corn. Beans, taro, yam, sweet potato, chillies, coriander, tomatoes and sponge gourd round out a collection that reflects the terraced, varied elevations found across Nagaland’s hill terrain. Of the 156 catalogued varieties, more than 116 are currently in active use by farmers.
Several of the preserved rice varieties are specifically valued for their resilience. Chizami Ru, for instance, is “known for their strong stems, long shelf life, and ability to grow with less care,” qualities that matter as rainfall patterns across the region become less predictable and farmers have less capacity to intervene with irrigation or chemical inputs during erratic seasons.
A loan system built on trust, not currency
The bank, inaugurated on 9 February 2018, operates on a seed-loan system: farmers borrow seed from the collection and return double the quantity after harvest, replenishing the bank’s stock while spreading traditional varieties back into wider cultivation. Preservation methods rely on traditional techniques, sun drying, local herbs and eco-friendly pest repellents, rather than refrigerated cold storage, keeping the model low-cost and replicable by other communities with similar resources.
Part of a wider community seed bank movement
Chizami’s model sits within a broader movement of community seed banks across India’s Northeast and beyond, where women’s groups in particular have taken the lead in documenting and conserving indigenous varieties that formal agricultural research institutions often overlook. Researchers studying similar seed banks elsewhere have found they play a genuine, if modest, role in helping farming communities adapt to climate variability by keeping a wider genetic base available when a single high-yield variety fails under stress conditions it was never bred for.
For Chizami’s women, the bank’s value is measured less in genetic science than in continuity: keeping seed varieties, and the farming knowledge attached to them, from vanishing along with the generation that carried them.
The society has also positioned the seed bank as a form of collective self-reliance that does not depend on state agricultural extension services reaching every village, a practical consideration in Nagaland’s hill districts, where terrain and distance can make formal outreach patchy. As other Northeast Indian communities look for models to replicate, Chizami’s combination of a simple loan system, low-cost preservation methods and sustained local leadership by women farmers has drawn interest well beyond the village itself.
Researchers and development workers who visit Chizami often note that the bank’s success rests as much on the social trust underpinning its two-for-one loan system as on the seeds themselves; farmers return double what they borrow because the system has functioned reliably for years, a form of institutional credibility that is difficult to replicate quickly in communities starting a similar initiative from scratch.
