In the hill villages of West Jaintia Hills district, Meghalaya, millets have been a dietary staple for generations — but the number of farmers willing to grow them had been quietly shrinking. Two friends from the village of Khanduli decided that was not a story they would let end quietly. Union Science and Technology Minister Dr. Jitendra Singh shared their initiative on Sunday, 25 October 2026, amplifying it as part of the #MannKiBaat conversation.

Cookies, cakes, muffins — and baby food from millets

The two women of Khanduli did not simply advocate for millets — they built a market for them. By developing value-added products including cookies, cakes, muffins, and millet-based baby food, they transformed a subsistence crop into a commercial proposition. The logic was clean: give farmers a buyer, and farmers will plant. As demand for the processed products rose, so did the incentive to cultivate millets once more.

Dr. Jitendra Singh's post noted the arc precisely — millet cultivation had been declining, the two friends stepped in with a product-first approach, and sales followed. The baby food line is particularly pointed: it targets urban, health-conscious parents who would never have considered a tribal hill-village crop, and pulls Khanduli's produce into a national conversation about nutrition.

Khanduli inside the bigger millet push

India championed the United Nations declaration of 2023 as the International Year of Millets, staking its agricultural diplomacy on the argument that these climate-resilient, nutrition-dense crops deserve a global comeback. The Northeast — with its distinct agrobiodiversity and traditional food cultures — was always central to that argument, even if the policy spotlight rarely reached villages like Khanduli.

Mann Ki Baat, Prime Minister Narendra Modi's monthly radio programme, has repeatedly used exactly these grassroots stories to connect national policy with ground-level action. A minister sharing such a story extends that reach onto social media, stitching the Khanduli initiative into a broader government narrative about women entrepreneurs reviving traditional agriculture.

What the Khanduli model signals for Northeast farmers

The pattern the two friends followed — value addition first, cultivation revival second — is replicable. Across the Northeast, tribal communities hold knowledge of indigenous crops that have no commercial outlet and therefore no reason to survive. A micro-enterprise that converts those crops into packaged goods can, as Khanduli shows, reverse a decline that decades of policy nudges could not.

The next question is whether initiatives like this get linked to state nutrition or government procurement programmes, which would guarantee volume and insulate the entrepreneurs from the volatility of artisanal markets. That bridge, between a village kitchen and a supply chain, is where the real scaling happens.

Two friends in a Meghalaya hill village did not wait for a programme to find them. The programme found them — and is now telling their story to the country.