It’s an innocuous little plot, a little over an acre, adjoining the Agriculture Training Centre (ATC) in Phulia, West Bengal. With some rice saplings on their way to fruition, nothing seems out of ordinary—till you speak to one of the ATC officials. The patch is the setting for a novel experiment in paddy cultivation, wherein 70 indigenous varieties of near obsolete rice saplings have been harvested—a development that is bound to benefit the farmers.“The onslaught of the high yielding varieties (HYVs) has made the local varieties disappear. So much so that the present generation of farmers can’t identify the varieties cultivated by their forefathers,” says Agriculture Development Officer Anupam Pal, the brain behind the experiment. Till only four decades ago, 5,800 varieties of rice were cultivated in West Bengal. But with the onslaught of the HYVs, only 516 varieties exist in the state. It took researcher Dr Debal Deb eight years to collect 516 varieties, of which only a hundred are cultivated in small pockets across the state. The remaining have been condemned to cold storages of research institutes or rescued by independent researchers. The ATC’s efforts at bio-diversity conservation began with five indigenous varieties of rice in 2000. Seven years later, 70 varieties (25 fragrant, 45 non-fragrant) were sown in the a plot and grown organically. Instead of chemical fertilisers, vermi-compost and cow dung manure were used. Neem oil, curd, alum, chilly paste, extract from tulsi leaves and cattle urine were used instead of pesticides, according to Bijan Kumar Roy, Principal of ATC. “I had to pool the varieties from independent farmers, scientists like Deb, the Chinsurah Rice Research Institute, NGOs, even staffers who collected the varieties from their native villages,” said Pal, who travelled to the remote interiors of the state—Midnapore, East and West Dinajpur, Bankura, North and South 24 Parganas, Nadia, Bardhaman, Jalpaiguri, even Bihar—to hunt for the surviving varieties. His effort has provided exceptional results, as the yield is expected to quash popular misconceptions about the productivity of the indigenous varieties compared to the HYVs. Under the same soil conditions, local varieties like Bahurupi fared better than their HYV counterparts like Swarna Kamal and Minikit in terms of grain yield. So a full bloom Khejurchari rice plant on the ATC farm had 75 tillers or branches. In fact, none of the rice varieties had less than 25 tillers which is comparable with the HYVs. The number of grains borne by a mature Bahurupi, a local variety, is 450, which easily scores over popular HYVs. More importantly, unlike the HYVs, the local varieties yield hay, which is used for cattle feed and in mushroom farms. So local varieties make for better economic sense. “Even if the HYVs give a yield of 720 kg in one bigha plot and the local varieties yield around 480 kg per bigha, the latter leads to higher profit margins. This is because the cost of inputs—pesticides and fertilisers—for the HYVs is significantly higher than for the local varieties,” said Bahadur Chetri, one of the two farmers roped in for the project. Another important feature is the range of varieties, including the rare Nagaland Special, Pakistani Basmati, Jugal and Shatin. The last two varieties contain more than two and three grains, respectively, in a single rice seed. All these have a stable yield and the seeds can be used for years. “It is sad that the farmers have turned their backs on these varieties which can compete with the HYVs. Also there isn’t any effort to explore the export potential of fragrant rice varieties,” said Pal. Perhaps his experiment will mark the beginning of the return to local varieties.
