Vedas Millet Mart Private Limited

In their own words

We are a group of Women Entrepreneurs collectively committed to building resilient lives and livelihoods in sync with nature. We work with farming households in dryland areas, artisans and women in difficult situations in AP, Telangana. Through Sayodhya - Home for Women in Need, we have provided rehabilitation support to 4000 women since its establishment and every year many women approach us with problems and seek shelter and livelihood support to lead their lives independently. Due to lack of technical skills or basic education they are unable to sustain themselves on their own. In order to achieve that, we have come up with an idea of popularising millets by selling them in cotton bags stitched by Sayodhya women. Women slowly bought sewing machines with the help of some funding through us and setup their own tailoring shops or worked from home. Women in Sayodhya do primary cleaning and processing of millets and pack them in eco friendly cloth bags made by them. Since the idea of selling millets to the neighbourhood gained momentum, we had to add more organic products to it to compete with the market. We started procuring directly from small and marginal farmers of Narayanapet district who are organized under FIRA (Farmers Initiative in Rainfed Areas) Mutual Aided Cooperative Society (MACS). The farmers evinced good interest in shifting to millet cultivation and natural farming. Millets helped improve the quality of women’s diet and also millet processing helped develop women entrepreneurs. In Year one, we procured their crop and sold them to Natural Products Shops in Hyderabad and other major towns as well as retail marketing and delivered it to their homes with extra home delivery charges since we could not afford a store at a prime place to attract customers. Plastic has become irreplaceable in our lives. All the packing in the departmental stores to small kirana shops are plastic. Mere 1 rupee chocolate also comes with a wrapper which does not degrade in a 100 years. Our main motivation was to replace plastic in our packing with an organic, eco-friendly and re-usable material. Since millets are not soggy and need air circulation we chose cotton bags. Cotton bags packaging gave employment to nearly 25 women who gave up on lives. Many customers who were sensitive about waste generation and the amount of pollution plastic is causing to our environment have reacted positively and subscribed to us monthly which has motivated not just us but also our women from Sayodhya. They learnt screen printing using natural dies to label the bags and design the bags aesthetically appealing. Millets were staple food 40 years back in most parts of rural India and after the green revolution the situation has changed in favour of paddy and wheat. The steady change in dietary pattern and life style lead to raise in many health problems like Diabetes, Cancer, Hypertension, PCOD and Obesity in children. We all know lifestyle diseases are biggest killers in India. There is 128% growth in Diabetes from 1990 to 2013, and health care expenditure on diabetes is $ 35 billion per annum. Cancer burden has more than doubled over the last 20 years. WHO reports says that there are 41 cancer patients, 6 cancer deaths in every lakh population. Earlier with the advent of Green revolution, rural agrarian economy had witnessed major shift from subsistence farming to commercial cultivation. Later government had introduced MSP on crops to help small farmers from the vagaries of markets. Farmers in dry land have shifted to commercial crops like tobacco etc and commercial plantations (ex. Eucalyptus) while millets (esp. sorghum) is cultivated for poultry and animal feed rather than for household consumption. With the shift to commercial cropping from millet food crops, many Farmers in dryland areas have lost their household food security and now the time has come to return to millets. Small marginal farmers in dry land areas can sustain if only there is steady market for millets and cost effective processing facilities nearby otherwise there is likelihood of shifting back to traditional ways. This is the right time for entrepreneurs to focus on millets since they have come back in the Indian agrarian landscape. Importance of millet diet is catching up, but there is a favorable environment, Thanks to the Indian Government for declaring 2018 as year of Millet Revolution marking a major policy shift, first time millet farmer won this year Padmashree Award

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