BHUBANESWAR: Dressed in a convocation robe, Raimati Ghiuria’s face lit up when President Droupadi Murmu conferred on her the honorary doctorate at OUAT’s 40th convocation earlier this week. The ‘Mandia Rani’ - a moniker that she has earned for preserving traditional rice and millet strains - is the first farmer from Bhumia tribal community to earn the honorary doctorate, the highest form of recognition a university can award to an individual.
For Raimati, a native of Nuaguda village of Koraput district who has so far preserved close to 40 varieties of millets and 80 paddy landraces, the recognition is a significant one. Because she has studied only till Class 7 and never entered any college to learn about organic farming and crops.
“My knowledge on preserving endangered species of traditional grains and organic farming is mostly from farms, my father, Kamala Pujari and father-in-law, and training at MS Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF). So, an academic degree is a happy feeling,” said 38-year-old Raimati who took an interest in agriculture from early childhood.
Born into a farmer’s family at Patraput village near Jeypore, she used to accompany her father and late Kamala Pujari who was also a resident of Patraput, to the fields. Following the footsteps of Kamala who is known for her outstanding efforts to preserve native varieties of paddy seeds, Raimati developed an interest in saving paddy and millet seeds that are widely grown in the area.
“There were many native varieties that were going extinct and there was an urgent need to save their seeds,” said the trailblazing farmer who, along with saving the seeds, began approaching farmers for growing them organically. This apart, she trained them in techniques of seed preservation.
Interestingly, marriage came as a shot in the arm for her. At the age of 16, she was married to Gobinda Ghiuria, the son of Trilochan Ghiuria, an award-winning farmer who worked on rice genomes. Noticing her efforts, her father-in-law encouraged her to keep working for the cause of traditional grains. Subsequently, Raimati started collaborating with MSSRF to promote community-based scientific rice and millet farming and then with the Odisha Millet Mission.
She has so far trained 2,500 farmers in millet farming techniques and continues to do so not just within Koraput but different other parts of the state. Some of the rice varieties that she has preserved include Kalajeera, Machkanta, Tikichudi, Haldichudi, Tulasi, and Laktimachi, which are resilient to factors like drought, salinity and flooding.
These varieties are nutritious too. When it comes to millets, four of the varieties preserved by her have been released in association with OUAT and Agriculture Department.
“There are varieties like Bati Mandia, Dasara, Chilika whose production is nearly five to seven quintals in just one acre of land if the farming conditions are favourable,” said the organic farmer who represented Odisha at the G-20 Summit.
She had also attended the Agricultural Conclave organised by Indian Council of Agricultural Research and Central Institute for Women in Agriculture in Bhubaneswar earlier this year.
For the past six years, Raimati has been heading a farmers producer company - Bamandei Company which is involved in production of bio-fertilisers and millet procurement. She is currently training 40 women farmers of the Koraput region in seed preservation and organic farming.