It’s an innocuous little plot, a little over an acre, adjoining the Agriculture Training Centre (ATC) in Phulia, West Bengal. With some rice saplings on their way to fruition, nothing seems out of ordinary—till you speak to one of the ATC officials. The patch is the setting for a novel experiment in paddy cultivation, wherein 70 indigenous varieties of near obsolete rice saplings have been harvested—a development that is bound to benefit the farmers.

“The onslaught of the high yielding varieties (HYVs) has made the local varieties disappear. So much so that the present generation of farmers can’t identify the varieties cultivated by their forefathers,” says Agriculture Development Officer Anupam Pal, the brain behind the experiment.

Till only four decades ago, 5,800 varieties of rice were cultivated in West Bengal. But with the onslaught of the HYVs, only 516 varieties exist in the state. It took researcher Dr Debal Deb eight years to collect 516 varieties, of which only a hundred are cultivated in small pockets across the state. The remaining have been condemned to cold storages of research institutes or rescued by independent researchers.

The ATC’s efforts at bio-diversity conservation began with five indigenous varieties of rice in 2000. Seven years later, 70 varieties (25 fragrant, 45 non-fragrant) were sown in the a plot and grown organically. Instead of chemical fertilisers, vermi-compost and cow dung manure were used. Neem oil, curd, alum, chilly paste, extract from tulsi leaves and cattle urine were used instead of pesticides, according to Bijan Kumar Roy, Principal of ATC.

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