Meet Karnataka’s Syed Ghani Khan, The Keeper Of Agricultural Diversity
When we talk of rice, we only know about the white rice and we don’t know about the green rice, black rice, or red rice, says Syed Ghani Khan, who runs a Rice Diversity Centre to conserve crop diversity. He says while has received a number of awards, he has not received the necessary support.
I wanted to become a museum curator. For that reason, in the first year of my college, I took up archaeology and museology. But I could not continue further studies as I had to take care of my family after my father developed a serious illness. I was the eldest son. That’s how I landed in the traditional profession of my family — farming.
I started farming on my ancestral farm in Kirugavalu village in Mandya district of Karnataka. Initially, I tried only conventional farming — or chemical farming, as it is called. I did that for three years. We already had three varieties of rice and that inspired us to create a bigger selection of rice varieties. Then, I started to think, why can’t we convert our farm into a live rice museum?
We then started collecting rice seeds from neighbouring villages, then from neighbouring talukas and then districts and finally from across the entire country. I went around the state and then around the nation collecting seeds and growing them, and then distributing it to farmers. We want to conserve the traditional varieties of rice for the future generation because these are existing varieties now. For this, I set up a Rice Diversity Centre. It is set up on the first floor of my house. It is a farmer-initiated non-profit traditional paddy diversity curating and training centre. We aim to conserve paddy diversity and disseminate indigenous wisdom of farmers. Till date, we have conserved 1,350 varieties of paddy.
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