The Hindu (Delhi)

Running on vegetable protein

Foxnuts are in demand as a ‘super snack’, with its prices soaring in domestic and internatio­nal markets since 2019. In Bihar’s Mithila region, which produces most of the country’s crop, A.M. Jigeesh finds that farmers receive very little of the money earn

Workers who don’t approach the plant carefully get wounded. It needs training to transplant and harvest, especially in big ponds. We have been doing this from childhood

Makhana farmer

Earlier, it was proposed that the GI tag be given to Bihar Makhana, but people protested and the government made it Mithila Makhana U.N. JHA

Former professor at Lalit Narayan Mithila University

Sravan Kumar Roy went from Bihar’s Darbhanga to Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur to study food technology. Despite their seeming difference­s, the two places are tied together by water — Darbhanga has wetlands and numerous rivers and ponds; Thanjavur is on the banks of the Cauvery. Both are known for rich cultivatio­n, a lot of it being rice.

At the National Institute of Food Technology, Entreprene­urship and Management, where Roy did a BTech between 2009 and 2013, he was nicknamed ‘Makhana Man’. “I introduced my teachers and batchmates to this ‘wonder food’. Except for the four north Indian students on my campus, no one had heard about makhana. Everyone else only spoke about the cashew trees on campus,” he recalls. Foxnuts were then eaten only in north India during Hindu fasts, along with sabudana (sago) and kuttu ka atta (buckwheat flour).

Today, Roy owns a business that retails from Darbhanga and online, producing 22 items from makhana, from the traditiona­l kheer to the innovative dosa and idli powder, to cater to customers down south, and even a 100% makhana cookie for the urban health food market.

The Indian Council of Agricultur­al Research (ICAR) estimates that Bihar produces 10,000 tonnes of makhana per annum, about 90% of the country’s total. India contribute­s to 80% of the world’s demand. The prickly water lily, from which the seed is harvested, is spread across more than 15,000 hectares in Bihar, and traditiona­lly grows wild.

About five lakh families, mostly from the Mallah community, are involved in its processing. Nine districts in the Mithila region now grow it for production: Darbhanga, Madhubani, Purnea, Katihar, Saharsa, Supaul, Araria, Kishanganj, and Sitamarhi.

Makhana, sold in the internatio­nal wholesale market at about ₹8,000 per kg, up from ₹1,000 about 10 years ago, is in high demand as a source of vegetarian protein in a world burdened by ‘meat guilt’ from animal cruelty and methanerel­ated temperatur­e rises. Indian wholesale markets sold makhana at ₹250 per kg a decade ago, with prices now at ₹1,400. However, rates are cyclical, with price increases during festivals, when demand goes up.

Mukhiya, the master of makhana

The people who harvest the seeds though — traditiona­lly boatmen and fisherfolk — say the government offers them little support, and they now want a minimum support price (MSP) to ensure that the crop is sustainabl­e for cultivatio­n.

The Bihar government runs the Makhana Developmen­t Scheme that gives a 75% subsidy on the Suvarna Vaidehi variety of seeds, calculated at ₹97,000 per hectare.

Also, makhana is a product approved under the Union government’s One District One Product scheme, under which subsidies are provided to food processors for branding, marketing, and developing infrastruc­ture.

Vinod Mukhiya, 42, is a landless farmer belonging to the Mallah community. He cultivates makhana across the five acres he has leased and partners with landowning farmers in about 20 acres. He also works as a farmhand, something he has done for the last 25 years.

When raised for cultivatio­n, sowing is done in December and January, transplant­ation in February and March, and harvest between July and October. The wild variety too is harvested at the same time. “The seeds fall into water. We collect them from the bottom of ponds, grade them, and dry them in the shade. Women in our homes roast the seed and break the shell off. They take out the lava (the white food commonly seen) and sell it. Now, makhana has a market,” he says.

Tall and lean, Mukhiya does not find it hard to handle the Euryale ferox, the lily’s scientific term, named after the Greek goddess, Euryale, born of a sea goddess and god, with hair of snakes, protruding teeth, and tongue hanging out. The plant, with dark pink flowers, has thorns all over. Only trained workers like Mukhiya are able to approach it. Workers use countrymad­e boats to navigate the large leaves.

‘Makhane ke patte se mooh pochke aao (Go wipe your face with makhana leaves)’ is an old saying of the Mithila region used on someone to check their ego or loose talk. “Workers who don’t approach the plant carefully get wounded. It needs training to transplant and harvest, especially in big ponds. We have been doing this from childhood,” Mukhiya adds.

The Mallahs of Mithila are considered the original inhabitant­s of this region. Kamala, a Mallah woman, sells makhana at the Darbhanga market. She pops it at home and brings it here. “I have been doing this since childhood,” she says. Women play an important role in increasing the earnings of a family. Farmers sell unprocesse­d, ungraded makhana seeds at ₹50₹200 per kg. The moment the shell is removed, the price climbs to ₹400₹800. For firstgrade makhana lava, farmers can demand up to ₹1,100₹1,250.

“We do not get enough support from the government,” Mukhiya says, adding that cooperativ­e societies, formed to help Mallahs cultivate makhana and grow fish in public ponds, are not working in their favour. Though rights to farm and harvest are given only to Mallahs, landowners most often maintain control. “We go for popping work to Assam and Bengal, for landowners there. Here, cultivatio­n is going down. Had we got enough support here, we wouldn’t have to leave Darbhanga.” He has heard of popping machines, but fears that they could take away the jobs of Mallah women.

Roy, the thinker and doer

Roy sits in his makhana processing unit situated in a lane near the Darbhanga Municipal Corporatio­n office. The government has given him space to set up a corporate office in Patna. He says the video he made on his graduation project, a makhana popping machine, got about a million views on YouTube. It also won an award at the Tamil Nadu Agricultur­e University, where he presented it. While his machine wasn’t a commercial success, it laid the foundation for his startup.

Roy opened his business in his grandmothe­r’s name, Sumitra, and named the brand FTMBA Makhanawal­a, where FT and MBA stand for the degrees he earned in Food Technology and Business Administra­tion. He put an illustrati­on of his face on the branding with the tagline, ‘ Now the time is for Super Food, not for junk food’. He invested ₹20 lakh initially, but does not disclose what his turnover is. What he can say is that by the time it is packaged, makhana could retail for up to ₹2,000 per kg.

One of Roy’s hopes is to break the pattern of thinking in Bihar’s middleclas­s families. “If you are a man and not in a government job, people think either you or the institutio­n you studied in has a problem,” he says, adding that his own family has held government jobs for a couple of generation­s. He secured corporate jobs soon after his graduation, including at Adani Wilmar. “I was earning well, but I always felt this was not for me.” Six years later, he decided to start his own business.

Roy’s business partner, Bhushan, is an engineer who also worked in corporate companies before deciding to come back to his hometown. “I wanted to create jobs for people in Bihar,” Bhushan says, citing the heavy migration the State sees. “During COVID, makhana got a bump for its nutritiona­l value. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about it. We are now supplying to foreign and Indian clients,” he says, adding that what they source from farmers has almost doubled in the past couple of years.

China and Pakistan also produce makhana, and the seed has markets across the world, from America and Europe to the United Arab Emirates and Southeast Asia.

Roy and Bhushan mostly employ women in their threeroom unit. They hope to hone the existing skills of those traditiona­lly from families involved in picking and popping of makhana, but are also training other women.

Kanchan Devi, who is not from the Mallah community, says she has been working here for two years now. “I have learnt how to pop makhana, but I also want to learn other techniques in food processing,” she says.

Roy sees large corporates entering the market as a problem as they will be “purely profitdriv­en”. “We process 20 to 30 tonnes of makhana every month. We help some farmers lease ponds and cultivate makhana. These farmers have increased their volume of cultivatio­n,” he says. Another problem, he says, is that value addition to the commodity takes place in urban centres. “Our effort is to ensure that valueadded products go from here.”

Professors, the protein propounder­s

B.R. Jana, a senior scientist at ICARNation­al Research Centre for Makhana, Darbhanga, says the crop is a good source of vegetarian protein, at 10%, and contains five of the nine amino acids. “There are also quercetin and kaempferol flavonoids, both of which protect against diabetes and obesity,” he says.

At the centre, Jana and other scientists are trying to cultivate the lily in managed ponds, so its hygiene can be ensured. They have shown that transplant­ed makhana grown in summer has a smaller yield than that of the rainy season, but has a higher protein content. “Organic makhana has a larger pop size, which opens doors to greater financial gain,” Jana says.

Vidya Nath Jha, a botanist and retired professor of Botany at Lalit Narayan Mithila University, has also spent many years researchin­g makhana. At his modest home in Professor’s Colony in the suburbs of Darbhanga, he has found space for copious literature on makhana, in different languages. His PhD thesis was one of the first academic studies on the crop. In 1988, he had establishe­d that makhana contains “very good quality protein”.

He also published a book through ICAR on the crop. “It had articles from all parts of India where it is cultivated — from Kashmir to Manipur,” remembers U.N. Jha, Vidya Nath’s guide at the time. Jha talks of its cultural significan­ce in the region. Makhana is derived from the Sanskrit words makh and anna, meaning the grains used during yagnas (rituals). “For the Mithila region, makhana is a must for all rituals,” he says.

Kojagra, a marital ritual observed on the full moon night of the Ashvin month in Mithila, has the bride’s parents send makhana as a gift to the groom’s house. This is distribute­d in the whole village. Recently, scientists at Banaras Hindu University found that the seed “has spermatoge­nic and aphrodisia­c properties”, says Jha.

He speaks of makhana and fish breeding as being part of the pond ecosystem, each dependent on the other. Traditiona­lly, farmers practise piscicultu­re, with makhanapic­king as a side hustle. It was only when ICAR establishe­d a centre in Mithila that the fisherfolk began to see it was a crop. “Earlier, it was proposed that the GI tag be given to Bihar Makhana, but people protested and the government made it Mithila Makhana,” he adds.

Big food firms and weather changes

Over the years, there has been a gradual decline in rains in this region. “Makhana does not require more than five feet of water, but now it is being cultivated in one or two feet of water, through transplant­ation. Women are involved in cultivatio­n, too, as it can be handled easily in shallow water,” says Jha.

Paras Kumar Singh, a farmer and Jha’s student, now cultivates makhana in about 20 acres of wasteland, leasing it for ₹8,000 per acre per year. “The input cost per acre is about ₹40,000. In 2021, I got 800 kg per acre. In 2022, the production decreased, and the price per quintal was ₹4,000 (₹40 per kg) to ₹5,000 (₹50 per kg). In 2023, production was still low because of a drought, but prices started at ₹16,000 (₹160 for a kg) and went up to ₹22,000 per quintal (₹220 per kg),” says Singh.

Very few farmers are engaged in popping as they do not have the resources to stock or trade. “Farmers are not wealthy, but traders can bear the logistics costs,” he says. He has been trying to get workers to pop the seeds, but finds it hard as most women work at home on their own family’s crop. He hopes that someone will invent a popping machine as small farmers who are not from the Mallah community find the task hard.

Smallscale traders are also nervous about big food companies. Tarachand Amolak Chand Jain — a makhana wholesaler, supplier, and commission agent at the Darbhanga market —says unless the government provides an MSP, it will be difficult for them to continue the business.