Jammu and Kashmir’s Lieutenant Governor, Manoj Sinha, closed the Millets Mission programme in Srinagar on 22 September by urging farmers, doctors and citizens to revive traditional grain cultivation, describing millets as climate-smart crops capable of anchoring both public health and agricultural resilience in the region.
Addressing the valedictory session at Lok Bhavan, organised in collaboration with the Kheti Virasat Mission, Sinha said research consistently shows millets “require minimal water, thrive on rain-fed lands, need little or no chemical inputs and they are highly nutritious, rich in fibre, iron, calcium and protein, with a low glycaemic index that helps combat lifestyle diseases such as diabetes.”
Framing millets as both health and climate policy
The Lieutenant Governor’s remarks tied together two policy threads that are often treated separately: public health and climate adaptation. On climate, he argued that “millets are climate-smart crops, offering resilience against increasing weather uncertainties and changing monsoon patterns,” a message aimed squarely at a region where erratic precipitation has already disrupted conventional water-intensive crops in recent growing seasons.
On health, the pitch was aimed at rising rates of diabetes and other lifestyle diseases, with Sinha positioning millets’ low glycaemic index and high fibre content as a dietary intervention rather than simply an agricultural one. The seminar’s dual framing, held partly at Government Medical College Jammu with doctors specifically urged to engage, reflects a growing effort in Indian public health circles to link nutrition policy directly to agricultural strategy rather than treating them as separate ministries’ concerns.
A call for seed diversification
Sinha also called on “all stakeholders” to “focus on seeds and crop diversification so that we can revive the diversity of our rich agricultural heritage,” language that echoes a wider national push, backed by the Indian government’s own millet promotion campaigns in recent years, to move away from a narrow reliance on rice and wheat toward a broader mix of traditional grains better suited to regional growing conditions.
The seminar did not release specific cultivation statistics for Jammu and Kashmir, and the region’s millet acreage remains modest compared with states such as Karnataka or Rajasthan where millet cultivation has a longer continuous history. Sinha’s remarks were framed more as a policy direction than an announcement of new government targets or subsidy schemes.
Farmer prosperity as the underlying argument
Underlying the health and climate messaging was a third argument aimed squarely at farmer incomes: that millets, requiring fewer purchased inputs and less irrigation, can lower production costs for smallholders even where market prices remain comparable to conventional staples. Whether that argument translates into meaningfully higher millet acreage across Jammu and Kashmir will depend on procurement support and market access, factors the valedictory session touched on only in general terms.
The seminar’s location, spanning both Lok Bhavan in Srinagar and sessions at Government Medical College Jammu, reflected an attempt to carry the message across both the Kashmir and Jammu regions rather than concentrating it in a single city. Organisers said the involvement of medical professionals alongside farmers and agricultural officials was deliberate, aimed at building a shared vocabulary between health and agriculture departments that have not always coordinated closely on nutrition policy in the past.
Officials from the Kheti Virasat Mission, which co-organised the seminar, have separately advocated for farmer field schools and seed exchange networks as practical next steps beyond the messaging delivered at the valedictory session, arguing that awareness campaigns alone rarely shift cultivation patterns without accompanying access to seed and a guaranteed buyer.
