There are several individual blogs and pages that have millet recipes.
I wanted to make a momma of all pages for the millet recipes, so that
you can get all at the same page!
To start with, I have compiled the currently active pages that have the
millet recipes. In the future, I want to update this blog into sections for
breakfast, lunch, dinner, sweets, occasional recipes, so that you can quickly
find the ones that you are looking for.
Standard disclaimer: As with anything that you intake, you should consult with your doctor/nutritionist/dietitian on your personal health circumstances on what is appropriate for you.
Have you heard of Millets, by the way? Some of us would say No. Because we have forgotten.
Well, Millets is a staple food, just like rice and wheat. They consume just 10% of water compared to rice while production.
Millets are rich in micronutrients and better for health than rice and wheat – it releases sugar in the blood very slowly. Guess what that means? Less risk of diabetes and better diabetes management.
Now, about Proso Pongal… the recipe is the same as traditional rice Pongal, so no need to rack your brain!
Go get Proso Millet from your nearby retailer for around 70 rupees per kg. It’s a bit expensive than rice, but it’s all worth it considering the health benefits and the social cause of water conservation!
We have decided to skip rice Pongal from now on, and going for Millets Pongal at our home. How about you?!
Together, as a community, Moodbidri has restored 18 water resources! They worked on reinstating the old water storage bodies by cleaning them and making them hold pure water! That’s gold!
India is facing huge water shortage because of real estate, agriculture, and mindless human reproduction. Local efforts like this give us hope. We will continue to create awareness about how to take care of ourselves.
If you are inspired by this story, please share it far and wide in your social media circles and talk about it to your contacts through word of mouth.
Kerala is reeling under floods. More than 100 people have lost their lives just yesterday. The shutters of all the dams in the state have been opened. Though Kerala gets heavy rains every year, this year, the quantum was too much.
A study showed that the effect of extreme natural conditions on the population will be too much because of two reasons: more and more people moving into low-lying areas because of lack of space, continuing land development because of which drainage paths and canals are being blocked due to which flash floods happen in unexpected land areas.
The root cause is very certain. We have become too much in number. We need to stop the reproduction, otherwise, nature will be nature and it won’t show mercy on anyone.
Adoption, instead of reproduction is a sensible option: http://cara.nic.in
Whenever we talk about big issues like population, food, or water, all of us are taken aback on what we could do on a personal level. In fact, we restrict our efforts to very minimal, get satisfied that that’s all we could do. While every small efforts are appreciated, we need to think out-of-the-box, open up our minds and look at things at various angles on how we could help.
If a man with very scarce resources can do so much, imagine how much we could do! It’s just a matter of heart. In today’s world of instant reachability and abundant resources, I don’t think it would never be a problem for us.
India has gone through roller-coaster rides in terms of food. There have been huge famines, but of late, there’s huge availability of food in terms of rice and wheat. We should be pretty happy, but at the same time, got to be very cautious on what we consume, as the rice and wheat food has led to chronic health conditions because of the unhealthy life style that we adopt.
Last week, I saw an article on how rice and wheat are consuming too much of water to grow, and how it is not sustainable. No, this is not a propaganda of the Genetically Modified crops lobby. I also read another article on how heart diseases in India has increased in the past 26 years.
Reading these has led me to believe that we should cut down on rice and wheat cultivation and grow more millets, which are healthy as well as consume less water. A healthy lifestyle is of course necessary, but not every one of us get the opportunity (sometimes it is even a luxury) to exercise, work out and stay fit. Diet is an important component in the equation (by the way, the whole equation is Diet + Exercise + Less Stress) for a healthy lifestyle.
As we already know, because of our sedentary life style, India has been declared as the diabetic capital of the world, so we should only help ourselves with less rice!
Here are some stuff that I have in my list to improve the situation:
Cut down on the rice and wheat consumption myself, and let my family and friends know
Talk to the land-owners and agriculturists that I know about this and make them grow more millets
Talk to the healthy food restaurants chains about this and make them deliver more millets-based food rather than rice and wheat based
Oh, and yes, share a lot of millets-based menus and recipes!
So, what is your plan of action? A small step in the right direction makes a lot of difference!
Recently I wrote about the looming water problem in India. At that time, all I had was questions on the enormity of the issue, and how we can tackle this. I made a bucket list of all the stuff that I can do, and I quickly followed up with a few people I knew on social media and otherwise, and the results were a bit comforting, although the efforts are long-drawn projects that need constant follow-ups.
I was deeply heartened to see that many people are actually working on the water already at various levels – creating awareness, conducting sessions, executing implementations to effectively use groundwater and rainwater, and coming up with innovations that can made radical improvements to the abilities to store water.
Two of such groups that I came across were The Rainwater Club and Bhungroo. Both of them are well-known in the water circles for their work. The Rainwater Club is doing their work mostly in Karnataka and Tamilnadu, while Bhungroo has projects all over the world, but head-quartered in Gujarat.
The Rainwater Club has modules to conduct trainings and sessions in the schools, so that awareness can be created among the children. It would be great to partner with them to conduct sessions at your schools, especially if you are a group of institutions or a chain of schools.
Bhungroo is all about implementation, you can reach out to them to implement their solution in the usually drought-hit areas of your state, to see if their solution would help the situation.
These two were great starts for me to do something about the areas that I know of, while I am talking to someone in Kerala to see if there’s a potential solution for their unique issue of land level being the same as sea level along the coast, and hence water cannot be stored underground! I am also planning to be in touch with a unique project in south India, to partner with them for projects and training on water for school children.
I was terribly shocked when on a fine morning this week, I saw the report from NITI Aayog about the impending water problem across India. In summary, it said that many states will run out of ground water by 2030.
This is very serious, and even more serious is the fact that around 30 cities in India will run out of water by 2020 (yes, you read that right; 2 years from now!).
It’s not like ‘Should I care? What can I do?’ It is more like ‘I got to do a thousand things that I can.’
Are you listening?
Alright, so here’s what I did. I picked up a sheet of paper and wrote down all the stuff that I can do. I am giving this here to be a starter or an inspiration for you to think of things that would work and make a difference:
1. Contact Indian organisations that are working in the field of primary and secondary education, as well as Indian organisations that work on public education, and make them create modules and syllabus that can be delivered to students and general public so that they are aware of how important water is and create awareness about the following topics:
Ground water restoration
Irrigation management
On-farm water use
Drinking water supply
Devising water policies
2. Strengthening the ways of predicting rains, such that general public can make arrangements to tap rain-water in whatever infrastructure they have wherever they live.
3. Try working with aerial experts to see if any additional data can be gleaned for point no. 2.
4. Creating awareness in colleges, so that the outgoing students can create products and software surrounding the issue. Bonus point: it creates jobs
5. Influencing the governments for implementation policies.
6. Contact on-the-ground organisations in various states to work on implementations in their states.
7. Work with organisations that already have a lot of reachability in remote areas (for example, population control organisations), and convince them to create awareness and educate their audiences.
What ideas do you have? Feel free to rack your brains – because it’s you and your children who are also going to affected by this. The usual Indian apathy won’t help!
Chennai is always remembered for its December Carnatic music concerts and the aroma of filter coffee!
But that’s not everything Chennai is remembered for. On the bitter side, it’s remembered for its never ending water woes. And the bad news is, it just got worse, because of the expansion of the city.
A recent reportstates that while Chennai’s current water supply is 600 million litters per day, it’s demand for water is going to grow to 1584 million litres per day in just 3 years! Urgent measures like getting ready to use the full capacity of desalination plants are going to yield very minimal results, as the demand is going to grow 2.5 times!
Chennai already has severe water shortage problem, and there’s no addition to the existing sources of water.
With a population of 8.6 million people as of January 30, 2014 (remember it was 4.3 million in 2001!), the demand is getting worse because of population explosion, immigration and urbanization. People can take pride with the fact that Chennai is growing by boundaries, and hence their real estate value is going to go up, but with no water to drink and use, the city’s existence and value is going to collapse if not now but in the near future.
In spite of Tamilnadu having many Tier 2 cities, the immigration is still happening to Chennai. Moving some Government functions and IT/BPO industries to the other Tier 2 cities will help mitigate the problem a bit. There are several logical choices like Trichy, Madurai, Tirunelveli and Erode.
Government is taking all the steps possible to take care of the water problem, but, ultimately it is in the citizens hands on how this can be mitigated.
I am not a water conservation advocate, because I know that at this scale, any amount of water conservation will not solve problem. I am not a tree planting advocate for Chennai, because (a) in Chennai, all the land has been usurped, (b) even if we start planting trees now, it will take 10 to 15 years for the trees to grow and take care of the water level – not to mention the Chennai problem of salt water mixing with underground water.
But I am going to suggest that Chennai folks stop their reproduction! Irrespective of whatever the Government does to mitigate the situation, even, if the state capital offices and IT/BPO companies are moved to other cities, if people keep on giving birth, it is not going to help the situation.
One could stay single (or) marry but not generate babies (or) adopt instead of giving birth.
There’s still a tendency to run to fertility clinics when existing people don’t have water to drink and use, and there are children on streets with no one to take care of them. Instead, folks should think of going to adoption centers and orphanage homes and see if they can adopt.
I am providing a few links on how individuals can act than blaming it on everyone and everything else.
As someone said, Chennai is drinking from water bottles, it won’t be far when it starts to bathe from water bottles. Now, that would be sad.
What would be your take on being a Nature’s friend?
There are so many themes that are talked about today on Nature or the environment, but to me it’s about protecting and nurturing the wonderful planet that we have been given. It’s a privelege to be in this algae-bluish-green rock that’s 2 stones away from the sun, breathing the fresh air, thriving and frolicking in this awesome earth!
But, for our conveniences and comfort, we have almost destroyed this planet in the past 3 decades in so many ways. Especially, the last two decades has seen the individualism rise to its peak – with people looking for individual comfort, diverging from the landscape of the past of few well-to-do and many minions. Well, that’s fine, only if we didn’t have this many heads! Especially, in India, the 1.3 billion!
Once a person is here in this earth as a human being, you cannot ask them to limit their aspirations – be a miser on their wishes, earn less money and live within the means – all these advices are not going to bear fruit – in this age of technology enablement, democracy and freedom. The only other option is not to bring in more and more human beings to this planet. We all have that choice as individuals, and if we really care about the Nature, that’s the best way of being the Nature’s friend!
Let me explain in more detail with some statistics – with data – for the folks who are not convinced of this.
Out of the 7 billion population of the world, 1.3 billion are in India! That’s 17% of world’s population living in 2% of the world’s land! You will very well agree that every human being need the basics of – air, water, food, space to live, education and job. Let me just take these basic 6 parameters without going into other extended parameters like energy, aspirations, travel and entertainment. Now, let’s look at where we stand in each of the 6 basic parameters:
Air
There’s oxygen depletion happening in earth, and they say that by 2025, we will have 40% less oxygen. Can you imagine breathing 7 times a minute instead of the regular 12 times a minute?
Water
Several business stalwarts are beating their chest that they have invested on water resources since the next world war is going to be on water! Fair enough if you want to be an autocrat who want to rule and control large masses of people, but if you want to be a sensible human being, you would rather contribute to creating awareness about containing the no. of people such that we all have water to drink. Water conservationists talk about conserving every drop of water from the tap, saving every water resource, etc. That’s all fine, but if the no. of human beings keep on increasing, how are they going to find land to live and water to use? They will encroach lakes, and thus bring down the amount of water available, in addition to consuming more & more water!
Food
No doubt India has done well on agriculture, but of late, we have lost our traditional grains and millets, and also looking for imports of wheat from foreign countries! This could be because of mismanagement, but the point is if we mismanaging with the existing levels of population itself, how will we able to manage more? We should be ashamed to that the sons and daughters of our agricultural workers do not even eat a single good meal everyday. As it stands, this scenario does not support ‘Nature’.
Space to live
Needless to say – the more no. of more human beings – more demand for living space – lakes, foothills, riversides enroached and houses built – and we cry foul and blame God when earthquakes, floods and natural disasters kill people – as happened in Uttaranchal recently. Well, is it the Nature’s fault ?
Education
70% of India lives in villages, and we all know the story of rural education. No intervention is helping because of the sheer no. of children that need be educated. Quality is already suffering, and in addition, if we have more and more babies, who is going to educate them? Let’s not forget that uneducated, unskilled people are a burden to the nation than being assets. If they are not educated, how will they be sensible enough to take care of ‘Nature’ ?
Job
Our workforce population between the age of 22 and 60 is going to increase from 575 million to 810 million in the span of next 15 years. This is without counting the babies that might come by in the next 2 decades. How are we going to give job opportunities to them, and what will happen to the ‘Nature’ while we build office and factory infrastructure for these people?
As it stands, we are looking at a very gloomy, bleak picture at Nature and its resources. We have leveraged to the maximum extent possible, wherein the demand can never be met with the supplies. It’s time that we need to reduce our demands by containing the no. of people – abstaining from having babies for the next two decades, and every one of us working in whatever ways possible to spread the message and making personal decisions in life – to be single, to marry but not to generate babies, but may be adopt, etc.
Government policies can be enforced to reward familes without children or families that totally adopt children, and not give the financial benefits for the families that generate babies. India, being a democratic country, will take many years for the people to accept any government initiated measures – and economic carrot being the prime motivator that could work in this market driven picture. We cannot enforce things on people, and we have known by experience that it does not work. Only way is to create awareness.
The urban people can adopt. The rural can stop generating babies for labour, while their economic wellbeing can be taken care by social enterpreneurship, NGOs and government measures.
If we all put our heart and soul on this, this can really work, and we will be doing a very big favour to the Nature by being a sensible race that nurture this planet and not destroy it for its selfish needs.
Otherwise, any amount of trees planted is not going to help. Any amount of water conservation is not going to help. And any amount of pollution control is not going to help. Because, we have exceeded the threshold of those measures being helpful and being scalable.
Please send your comments to populationvision2050@gmail.com
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