Capital grain: We’re paying a higher price for rice than we realise, says Mridula Ramesh
There are grains that would guzzle far less water and do less harm to soil and air, but our markets are now engineered for this one. Something’s got to give. Preferably before the water runs out.
One of the great joys of writing is reading, and of all the books I’ve read, few remain as memorable as the Mahabharata. In it lies the remarkable tale of a king who has lost everything — his wife, his kingdom and his identity — but not his skill. Disguised as a servant, Nala becomes such a masterful cook and charioteer that another king asks him to share his knowledge of the art and science of cooking.
Nala’s reply forms one of India’s earliest cookbooks: Paka Darpanam (literally, Mirror / Reflections on Cooking). This philosophical and practical book includes verses on how to cook rice and how not to. Nala warns against eight defects, including overboiling, burning, and using stale or out-of-season rice.
To cook the grain well, he says, choose unpounded, dry rice; wash it in hot water and immerse it in three times as much water, letting it come to the boil while stirring constantly. Sprinkle milk, buttermilk or water on top, take it briefly off the fire, then bring it to the boil again until the grains turn soft. The result, he promises, is nourishing and promotes longevity.
Rice is woven into diets across India and celebrated in every festival, whether as rice beer during the Wangala feast of the Garos of Meghalaya or boiled with jaggery and milk in pongal and offered to the sun god as thanks for a bountiful harvest.
On a more regular basis, south Indians once drank neeragaram, a traditional beverage made from leftover rice fermented in water, valued for its gut-friendliness.
The roots of this crop stretch deep into our history. In Adichanallur, immense red burial urns, large enough to hold a person, were found to contain traces of rice and millet husk dating to c. 1400 BCE, as Arun Raj of the Archaeologic Survey of India once told me. Traces have been found at several Harappan sites. The archaeo-botanist Dorian Fuller’s work suggests that Oryza sativa indica may have been domesticated more than once. But the oldest evidence so far comes from excavations around the Lahuradewa lake in Uttar Pradesh, where charred grains have been dated to 6409 BCE.
Rice permeates the spoken and written word: the Atharva-Veda describes how to brew alcohol from it, while Sangam poets infused their verses with it — puffed, beaten, withered or fragrant. In one poem, a woman mourns her lover’s departure, telling her friend that grief will ruin the beauty of her forehead, once like a tableau of geese asleep in fields of long, red paddy. In another poem, addressed to an owl, a sleepless lover promises it a meal of white rice cooked in ghee, with goat and white-rat meat, if only it will stop its hooting and let her rest while she waits for her beloved to return.
This grain — pink, red, black, white, cream and various shades in-between — reflects regional history, diet and climate. The Indian agronomist RH Richharia wrote: of varieties that could thrive in up to 14 ft of water (such as Hbj-Aman 3 from Assam); of Muskhan from Punjab, hardy against adverse climates and fragrant when cooked, with a straw that cattle liked; of Odisha’s aromatic Badshabhog and the easily digestible Dadhkhana. Until a few decades ago, India boasted of thousands of varieties, each finely tuned to its region’s climate.
But our quest for food independence, a necessary goal, ironed out the variations. Could we have saved the thousands of varieties? Probably. Should we have? Absolutely. Because, quite apart from their importance to regional identities, such a rich genetic resource should never have been mindlessly cast away.
Then, as its diversity receded, rice began to infest new geographies.
Take Punjab. In 1966-67, rice occupied less than 7% of its fields; today, it covers 64% of the state’s geographical area. The shift is of national consequence. Punjab now produces about 10% of India’s rice but dominates government procurement. The government buys more grain from this state than from others with far larger harvests, such as West Bengal and Uttar Pradesh, thanks in part to Punjab’s world-class market infrastructure. Procurement even surpasses the state’s actual production, as grain from neighbouring states is sold there. The state encourages this, earning thousands of crores in taxes.
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But there is a problem of excess.
In July this year, months before the harvest, Punjab’s grain godowns were still full of last year’s wheat and rice. Punjab’s farmers are now reportedly struggling because there isn’t enough space to store their harvest.
This is a national problem: In July, godowns nationwide held 37.5 million tonnes of rice, the highest level in 20 years, and three times the required buffer stock. October also saw too much grain in storage. This pushed the government to offload it cheap, to make ethanol. But making ethanol from rice is highly inefficient. It takes 83% more water to make a litre of rice-ethanol than it does to make a litre from sugarcane, which is itself no water hero.
India’s northwest is dry. Much of Punjab gets between 400 mm and 600 mm of rainfall a year; too little to support the green ocean I saw when I drove across the state during the kharif season. The shortfall is made up by the region’s groundwater. Since the local population doesn’t traditionally eat much rice, most of this groundwater flows into other parts of India, embedded in the paddy — a virtual groundwater river carrying more than 14 billion cubic metres a year; enough to quench the needs of the six largest cities of India for over two years.
While typical rivers transport water from water-rich regions to water-scarce ones, this one, the child of policies that have outlived their utility, does the reverse: it drains the critical climate insurance of one of India’s driest regions.
This is folly at an epic, dangerous scale. It reflects a profound disconnect.
Why does the grain keep flowing in?
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Farmers tell me they are drawn to rice because it is easy to grow and offers a secure market: they don’t need to worry about whether the crop will sell, or what price it will fetch. This ease is compounded by the research, hand-holding and state machinery readily available for this crop.
Meanwhile, Indians are diversifying their diets, reducing their reliance on cereals.
Even the poorest Indians, the group most reliant on cereals such as rice and wheat for their calories, are moving away. Their daily protein intake from cereal has fallen from about 90% in the early 1970s to about 50% today. Wealthier Indians are far less reliant on cereals, getting just 30% of their protein from this food group.
Subsidised grains remain a lifeline for the poorest, providing half their caloric needs for just 5% of their monthly expenses. But in trying to squeeze two such crops, rice and wheat, onto a single field every year, farmers begin burning paddy stubble left behind by labour-saving machinery. This is a major contributor to the winter haze over the north, especially as the changing seasonal climate stills the winds that once eased it away.
While driving recently through Bundelkhand, another dry region that has succumbed to the deadly rice-wheat lure, I saw farmers setting fire to their fields, ravaging their soil in the process. Did they care? Probably. But the temptation of ready procurement and cash was too hard to resist.
Cuisine has changed alongside. The hotel we stayed in served us a fabulous Bundelkhand thali that included rice and millet-based rotis. When I asked a local whether this was customary, he replied it wasn’t but the rice had been added because “people expect it”.
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The impact of climate change on rice is mixed in the tropics, especially when seen in aggregate. But “in aggregate” offers little solace to a farmer whose fields have just been flooded.
Grown out of place, rice turns into a climate villain, draining groundwater and shredding the resilience of dry regions. Its flooded fields release methane, a greenhouse gas 28 times more potent than carbon-dioxide (at trapping heat over a 100-year period), resulting in rice alone reportedly accounting for over 2% of India’s annual greenhouse gas emissions.
We are caught in a self-destructive spiral that ignores all signals to stop, whether these be the rotting grain in storage, smoky winter skies, enormous budgetary allocations, dying soil, or fast-emptying groundwater reserves.
I have been reading lately about the historical excesses of capitalism; about how slavery and drug peddling once flourished beneath the fig leaf of a free market. It is a sobering reminder (if we needed any) that the unrestrained pursuit of profit can be a dangerous thing.
And yet rice’s story provides a counterpoint. It tells us the markets can offer a solution, if we allow them to function correctly. If we priced water according to scarcity, making it more expensive in dry places and during dry seasons, paid farmers for soil carbon, and charged fair prices for electricity and fertiliser (replacing subsidies with direct cash payments to farmers), crop choices might automatically shift (especially if procurement were reformed).
Ways to improve rice cultivation exist too. New technologies allow the crop to grow with far less water, and hardy traditional varieties even fetch a premium in some markets. But these signals are snuffed out amid the ready MSPs, limitless procurement and mountains of subsidies.
Something’s got to give. Preferably before the water runs out.
(Mridula Ramesh is a climate-tech investor and author of The Climate Solution and Watershed. She can be reached on tradeoffs@climaction.net. The views expressed are personal)
