Vol. 12, Issue 9 (2023)

Millets are a group of crops having small seeds and are considered as nutri-cereals as they are highly nutritious containing a rich amount of Proteins, Fibre, Minerals, Iron, Calcium etc. Along with these nutritional benefits, Millets are also a perfect Climate resilient crop and thus our government is emphasising on implementing farmer friendly schemes and policies to enhance the production and consumption of Millets in our country. With the prominence in production of Wheat and Rice due to the introduction of green revolution in 1960, there was a decline in the production of Millets in our country. Thus, this paper is an initiative to create awareness among people regarding the schemes and programmes implemented by Indian Government to boost the production & consumption of Millets to get higher returns from minimum possible investment. As India is the 5th largest exporter of Millets in the world, a lot of effort is being made by the State as well as the Central Government to mainstream the production and consumption of Millets. Programmes like National Food Security Mission, Integrated Cereal Development Programmes in Coarse Cereals & Initiative for Nutritional Security through Intensive Millet Production-Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojna etc. have been implemented by the government, which has accelerated the production of Millets upto 17.96 MT in 2020-21 from 14.52 MT in 2015-16 as per the data of the Department of Agriculture and Farmers Welfare. With production, consumption is equally important and thus in order to encourage the usage of Millets, Ministry of Food Processing Industries is also making efforts to promote the production of Millet-based products through schemes like Production Linked Incentive Scheme for Food Processing Industry (PLISMBP) with an objective to enhance the consumption of Millets via Ready to Eat and Ready to Cook products.