Engineer couple brings millets back to homes, clocks Rs 2.05 crore annual turnover

Kalyani was introduced to millets by her grandmother when she was six. Her grandfather was a farmer but she had never imagined that one day, she would be working with thousands of farmers to re-introduce these ancient grains on their farms. 

Earth 360 Eco Ventures Pvt Ltd was established in 2010 by Kalyani's husband M N Dinesh (fondly called ‘Millets Dinesh’). To mainstream millets, the venture has created a millet-based supply chain through technology development, production, procurement, processing and marketing of millets and millet products. 

Their work encompasses supporting farmers to cultivate millets, developing technology for processing coarse grains, creating awareness around millet-based recipes and selling millet flour, grits, semolina, and other food items.

The turnover of Earth 360 in the last financial year was Rs 2.05 crore. 

The couple is based in Kadiri, 92 km from Anantapur in Andhra Pradesh. Kalyani has a diploma in civil engineering from a polytechnic in Andhra Pradesh while Dinesh studied BE in electronics and communication from Mysuru. The couple met at an organisation called Timbaktu Collective where they both worked. 

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The health benefits of millets are well known. Millets can be grown in all soil types and do not require much water. In general, millet cultivation does not require pesticides and farmyard manure are sufficient. “Anantapur district, now renamed Sri Sathya Sai district, and the entire Rayalaseema region, had millet-based food and farming culture for years,” says Dinesh. 

How millets vanished

“In 1982, the state government announced the supply of paddy rice for every family at Rs 2 per kg. Each family was given 20 kg of rice. That’s when the change began. People who were consuming millets like ragi, bajra and jowar started eating rice. Even earlier, the middle and upper middle classes ate rice as it was a ‘status symbol’. Millets were associated with the labour class, a poor man’s food,” explains Dinesh. 

Slowly, millets disappeared from the farms in Anantapur. By 1985, more than 95 percent of the area under millets was lost to other crops like groundnut, cotton and maize. 

“The worsening agrarian crisis among the rainfed farmers in Anantapur due to increasing losses in the groundnut crop motivated us to work on reviving millets as an alternative crop,” says Dinesh.   

Also, there was increasing malnutrition among the local communities due to changes in diets from diverse millet-based foods to predominantly polished paddy rice and wheat-based diets which are nutritionally poorer, says Kalyani. 

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Revival of millets

Earth 360 has played a pioneering role in the revival of millets in the country. Dinesh and Kalyani have been actively engaged in ecosystem building by working across the millet value chain from seed to plate. 

“Over the years we have been engaged directly with 500 farmers in a year. Indirectly, by way of enabling the establishment of 50 enterprises across Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu, we have been able to create sustained market linkages for over 10,000 farmers who have taken up millet cultivation,” says Dinesh. 

Dealing with nine millet crops, the venture has created awareness among consumers, organised village-level seed production and storage activities, trained farmers in millet cropping practices and produced organic inputs locally. 

“We have also been engaged in the documentation of millets research and development work. This contributed to the development of a policy framework for millet promotion at the national level,” says Dinesh. In 2014, Dinesh was selected as an Ashoka fellow for socially relevant work.

Earth 360 was recently selected for the fellowship given by The Buddha Institute founded by IIM, Ahmedabad alumnus and development entrepreneur Ved Arya. 

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Parthasaradhi Nara belongs to a farmer’s family. He was inspired by Earth 360 to start millet cultivation. “I worked in the IT sector for 11 years. However, I was observing the integrated farming practices in the family from a young age. Now I am totally involved in organic farming,” he says. 

He is part of a farmer’s collective of 300 farmers practising natural farming. Along with fruits, vegetables, pulses and rice, they also grow millets. “The name of our collective is Anantha Naturals Collective. Customers have realised the benefits of consuming millets and there is growing demand. Earth 360 has helped us by providing seeds and educating us about suitable farming practices for millets,” he explains. 

Finding a market  

“When we started our work in 2002 for millet revival, most of the farmers had forgotten millet cultivation practices. It was a daunting task to convince farmers to cultivate millets,” says Kalyani. 

“Anantapur is the second worst drought-affected district in the country. Farmers were cultivating groundnut which is an expensive crop that requires more rain. Seeds cost Rs 40-50 per kg while millet seeds cost around Rs 8 a kg. When the groundnut crop failed it was a huge economic burden for farmers. Millets were more suited to the local conditions. We asked farmers to allocate one-third of the land to grow millets,” relates Dinesh. 

Also Read: Andhra farmer sets up multi-crore millet business; helps 1500 growers earn more

The next challenge was finding a market for millets. “In 2002, we encouraged farmers to grow millets on 300 acres. In 2003, we tried to market the produce. It was bought as chicken feed at the rate of Rs 300 per quintal (Rs 3 per kg)! We were disheartened. But we were determined to do something to create a market,” says Dinesh.

“We bought millets from farmers and started exploring markets. In 2009 Dinesh anchored the Pilot project to enable the Introduction of millets into the Public Distribution System (PDS) to diversify the people’s diet. Through PDS 5 kg ragi, 2 kg bajra and 1 kg jowar at 50 percent subsidised rate to each family.”  

“As part of the Millets Program in Timbaktu collective, we trained a group of women to manage a hotel called Dharini as early as 2005, exclusively selling millet-based preparations. It was popular in Chennekotha palli village and functioned for six to seven years,” adds Kalyani.

In 2009, there was a severe drought in the region. Farmers could not grow groundnuts. The land would have been kept fallow. The couple mobilised support from friends and networked with other NGOs and distributed millet seeds to farmers to cultivate 5,000 acres. 

Technology challenge

The third hurdle was the absence of technology for the primary processing of millets. Dinesh started working on this problem. Efficient processing machines have been designed and developed for all the nine millet varieties that Earth 360 deals in – foxtail, finger (ragi), sorghum (jowar), barnyard, pearl (bajra), little, kodo, proso and browntop. 

The mobile multi-purpose grader developed by Earth 360 for cleaning millets won an award at the National Industry Expo in the Vibrant Gujarat technology competition. 

The fourth challenge was that people had forgotten how to make dishes using millets. Also, they had to be reminded about the health benefits of millets.  

Kalyani worked towards creating consumer awareness by organising millet cooking workshops across the country, participating in state and national level events for millet promotion, training cooks and working with restaurants on making millet-based preparations, and publishing recipe books on millet-based dishes. 

“We also conducted awareness programmes in schools, in ashrams where millets were consumed and in societies where we were invited,” says Kalyani.

Diverse products

Earth 360 offers millets in the following forms – rice, grits (broken rice), semolina and flour. Some of the millet-based products marketed are - foxtail ‘pongal’ (khichdi) and ‘bisi bele bhath’ (sambhar rice) mixes, popped jowar (ready-to-eat), and multi millet mixes - nutri mix, roti mix, dosa mix and khichdi mix.  

“Our marketing channels involve mainly B2B and B2C. People buy for their family consumption from us regularly. We do not have an online store. Our sales are mostly offline. We have a point of sale at our factory gate which forms 15 percent of our overall sales,” explains Dinesh. 

One of the B2B buyers is Adhi Foods based in Coimbatore. T.N. Balasubramaniam, manager of the company, says: “We started buying millets from Earth 360 in 2015 and selling it in Coimbatore. The company delivers clean, good quality and neatly packed products. As the couple is very experienced and supportive, they address any issue we face promptly. With the increase in awareness about millets, the demand has also surged. Now we buy 500-750 kg per month of millets from them.  The popular varieties among our customers are barnyard millet and little millet,” he says. 

Plans include enhancing the production capacity threefold, focusing on local consumption to strengthen the local market (Kadiri and nearby villages) and streamlining the manufacture and marketing of machines developed by Earth 360. “This will help create more millet-based enterprises across different regions of the country and thus improve access to millet foods for a larger population,” says Dinesh. 

(Aruna Raghuram is a freelance journalist based in Ahmedabad. She writes on women’s issues, environment, DEI issues, and social/development enterprises.)

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