West Bengal government encourages cultivation of extinct rice varieties

KOLKATA: West Bengal's agriculture department has decided to encourage farmers to cultivate extinct varieties of rice is drawing up plans to create a market for them. The department is also helping farmers to adopt organic farming methods.

Agriculture department officials said that these indigenous varieties of rice, which are also known as folk rice, have properties which make them suitable for cultivating in particular regions and are also highly nutritious. For example, there is a variety which has become extinct but is now being revived that , grows well in the saline soil of the Sunderbans where the popular rice varieties mayfail to grow.

The agriculture department is trying to revive forgotten varieties of aromatic rice like Radha Tilak, Kala Bhat, Dudheshwar, Hamai, Jhumpuri, Khara and Balam, to name a few with technical support from the state government’s agricultural training centre in Phulia in Nadia.

This initiative has been launched to bring back traditional aromatic varieties of rice by using natural methods. The use of chemicals to enhance production is discouraged because, in the long run, it will badly affect the environment, including the quality of the soil.