National Conference cum Expo on Rural Development and Millet organized by Millet Mart Ventures Pvt Ltd in association with Liyan Agro Foods Pvt Ltd eventuated in New Delhi today. The event aimed at the promotion of Millet-dependent agri-life with the larger idea of rural development.
The event was attended by Dr. Manoj Nardeosingh Secretary General, African – Asian Rural Development Organization; Satyanarayanan Raman COO, Millet Mart Ventures Pvt Ltd; Parthasarathy Iyengar CEO, Millet Mart Ventures Pvt Ltd; R. Shankaran, CMO, Millet Mart Ventures Pvt Ltd; Dr. Sanjiv Behara, AARDO; Rajkumar Sharma, President, AICRA; Dr. Parasuraman, Principal Scientist at MS Swaminathan Foundation; Dr. Sudhanshu, Secretary, APEDA, Ministry of Commerce and Industries; Prof. Moni Madaswamy, Former Director General NIC; MC Dominic, Editor-in-Chief, Krishi Jagran and several other dignitaries.
The keynote address was presented by Dr. Manoj Nardeosingh, Secretary General, African – Asian Rural Development Organization: “Millets are an important cereal, and answering Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), mainly SDG 2 (zero hunger) and SDG 3 (good health and well-being). The IYoM celebration will allow policymakers to review policy to adapt to changing landscapes, new ecosystems, and resilience in the economy. The conception of IYoM will go beyond 2023 and a special paper on the impact of millets will help in the development of the value chain. India is the brightest spot in the world as its leading G20 presidency. More cooperation by the organizations is required to make this program successful.”
Parthasarathy Iyengar CEO of Millet Mart Ventures Pvt Ltd conveyed: “We have already taken up the initiative; discussions are going on at a higher level and we are quite sure that in the days to come the proceedings will start as soon as possible. Technology is the front driver of this particular initiative and we've left no stone unturned to bring the tech and also deliver the right form of technology with a very safe way to deliver food globally, especially with millet, that can be replicated in any food product basically. I'm very happy to announce here that millet Mart ventures patented a particular process that can be deployed all through the food start-ups that is bringing out the traceability of food process called MMV food trust.”
“We operationalized the smart tribal farming in a cluster of 10 villages; Gujarat, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Madhya Pradesh, Jharkhand, Orissa, Chhattisgarh, Kerala, Tamil Nadu, and Karnataka. With local NGOs, a series of discussions was done on how to promote millets in clusters of these 10 villages and integrate productivity with the global value chain. The exercise on the job was to train boys and girls in millet processing.” stated Prof. M. Moni Madaswamy, the Former Director General of the National Informatics Centre.
“Millets are smart and nutri-rich cereals. More millet start-up program is required to promote IYoM 2023,” stated Professor Parasuraman Raman, Principal Scientist at M. S. Swaminathan Research Foundation.
“Based on the work which I've done in the technology industry for the last 20 years I've served different industries across the world and I've worked on very large system integration projects. In the year 2000, the white cape problem has come in the US, the main frame systems had the ‘ddmmyy’ i.e., the number of digits was two but by the year 2000 the number of digits would become 00 which was to run on mainframe systems, which will crash that meant the world will crash. They wanted to change it to four digits, for the herculean task they needed lots of programmers because the source code is written in Cobol programming language. One had to locate the source code and change it from two digits to four digits. When the US was looking for lakhs of programmers it had two options where the developers were in abundance: one is India and the other is China. India had an advantage over China as Indians would read, write and speak English whereas Chinese programmers wrote their source code in Chinese. When India had an opportunity to go and fix the problem the Americans were thinking about how the Indian programmers would do as they were stringent about the quality. Then a NASSCOM body was formed and they started mapping the CMM which is the highest standards of quality in the world and they started training the programmers" said Satyanarayanan Raman COO of Millet Mart Ventures Pvt Ltd drawing the analogy to understand the role of Millet Mart in the promotion of Millets.
“Farmer the Brand or FTB, introduced by Krishi Jagran aimed at creating brands of farmers. We have had 60-80 farmers during Covid who got business from many international countries. We can make Millet-based farmer brands. Another initiative taken by Krishi Jagran is Farmer the Journalist, where a farmer from the village is able to express the ground realities of rural India.” Editor-in-Chief of Krishi Jagran, MC Dominic at the event.
