Kamala Pujari: The woman who walked village to village to save Odisha’s traditional rice

In BHARAT BHAGYA VIDHATA, Santosh Nair tells the story of Kamala Pujari, the Odisha farmer who walked from village to village collecting indigenous paddy seeds that were disappearing from local fields. Her story is about conservation, livelihood and the idea that some things survive only when they are passed on.

In many Indian homes there used to be a tin at the back of the kitchen shelf that was never quite emptied. A handful of rice kept aside. A few seeds saved for the next sowing. Our grandmothers did it without being taught, because they knew that what is eaten today must also be planted tomorrow. Most of us no longer keep such tins. We buy what we need, and when it runs out we buy again. In a small hamlet in the Koraput district of Odisha, a woman noticed that her whole village was forgetting the old habit of keeping, and she spent the rest of her life trying to keep for everyone.

Her name was Kamala Pujari. She came to Patraput, a hamlet of about 119 households near Jeypore, as a young bride, more than forty years before the rest of India heard of her. In those days, she remembered, the village grew around fifteen kinds of indigenous paddy, with names like kalajira, gothia, haladichudi, umuriachudi and machhakanta. Each family grew two or three different kinds. After the harvest, people exchanged seed and grain with one another, so the village kept its variety without anyone planning it. It was not a project. It was simply how neighbours lived.

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When the old rice began to disappear

In the mid-1990s she noticed the varieties thinning. Large joint families were splitting into smaller households, and smaller households, with less land and less money, turned to high-yielding hybrid rice. The government mandi would not buy many of the old varieties because they did not meet its standards. One by one,........

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