A Seed Saviour for More Than 1,000 Types of Rice

By Bindu Gopal Rao

With over 1,300 native species of rice, Syed Ghani Khan’s Rice Diversity Centre is India’s largest private paddy museum.

On a bright October morning, I was driving along a narrow road in Karnataka’s Mandya district, hoping to learn about traditional varieties of rice. Luckily, I had a map, but I still managed to overshoot my destination, distracted by the paddy fields on either side. After a small detour, I found myself at the home of 44-year-old Syed Ghani Khan, a farmer who has conserved 1,300 native species of rice. Located on the first floor of his home in Kiragavalu village, the museum is aptly called the Rice Diversity Centre. It is India’s largest private museum dedicated to paddy.

Settling into the rustic portico of his home, I ask Khan to tell me the story of how he started on his journey with native rice species.

“We belong to an agricultural family and have been farming for about 200 years in the last five generations,” he told me.  “After completing tenth grade in our village, I finished junior college in Mysore and started my undergraduate studies in Commerce in 1996. Unfortunately, six months into the course, I had to give up and return home as my father suffered a brain hemorrhage. Being the eldest son in the family, I had to take up farming.”

Khan’s earliest memories of growing food are of cultivating vegetables in his kitchen garden while still in school. However, after higher studies, he returned to the conventional rice farming that his father had started.

“Although my father used fewer chemicals, I tried to opt for the improved and hybrid varieties. These needed more fertilizers and chemicals, and I would do seed production of hybrid paddy seeds,” he said. 

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It was on a regular day when he was spraying pesticides on his farm that Khan had an epiphany.

“I had a sudden headache and sat down in the farm itself and thought that while farmers are perceived to be food providers, or annadata [anna is rice in Kannada], I was spraying poison in the form of chemicals. So, I am actually someone who poisons others, or vishadata [visha is poison]. Then, I felt that the work I am doing is certainly not being appreciated by God.” On that day in the year 2000, he decided to switch to organic farming. At the time, he had three varieties of paddy in the farm: kala baath, jeerege sanna and basmati.

Before embarking on his new mission, Khan remembered his grandmother’s advice of using green manure and cow dung. “I started organic farming with 40 grains of [a variety called] ratna chudi, which my uncle gave me,” he said. “I was able to harvest two kilograms of rice with those 40 grains. I then planted these two kilograms and got two sacks of rice. I used one sack as paddy and conserved the other for seeds, which I planted in two acres.”

An article in a local newspaper gave his efforts a much-desired impetus and brought some attention to his farming practices. He was flooded with letters from farmers asking for seeds. That is when he considered switching over to heirloom rice variants and began thinking about conserving seeds.

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Keen to complete higher education, which he had to abandon because of family commitments, Khan rejoined the government-run Maharaja College in Mysore to study archaeology and museology. For someone who always dreamt of opening his own museum, the course in museology helped him gain a sounder understanding of conservation techniques.

“I started collecting traditional seed varieties on field trips and soon had a good collection,” he said. At the same time, he also started attending talks organised by Sahaja Samrudha Organic Producer Company Ltd (SSOPCL), a Bengaluru-based cooperative that helps connect organic farmers with consumers. In 2004-2005, he participated in the ‘Save Our Rice’ campaign, a nationwide initiative to protect and promote indigenous rice variants. As part of this campaign, he travelled to other Indian states like Orissa, Maharashtra, Gujarat and Chhattisgarh, met farmers and collected their seeds. 

This gave him the impetus to realize his long-standing dream. “Since I had a considerable collection of seeds, I felt that these must be showcased in a rice museum to fulfill my desire of being a curator,” he said. In 2006, Khan started the museum in his old home. In 2019, he moved it to the current location.

Indigenous varieties such as those Khan grows on his farm are more resilient to climate change.

Apart from the 1,300 varieties of rice that are displayed in glass cases at the Rice Diversity Centre, Khan also has a ‘live museum’ on his farm, where visitors can see these variants growing. At the moment, one portion of his 16-acre farm is dedicated to indigenous varieties such as black, brown, red and green rice, as well as 60-day and 180-day harvest varieties. “We have deep water, dry land, saline salt and medicinal varieties (like navara, ambe mohr, sannakki, khaime and raktasali). We also have deep water varieties that can sustain floods (such as doobraj, jal doobraja, yene kuni) and drought-resistant varieties,” he said.

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Khan has been doing this work without any financial or material backing. He says it is important to preserve traditional paddy variants before they are lost. “The next generation must know of these too, and if I do not preserve them, it would be a disservice to society,” he said. The importance of his mission is demonstrated by the fact that in the last four decades alone, experts believe that India has lost a significant number of its indigenous rice varieties. In the ‘70s, Dr R H Richharia, a leading rice expert in India, documented nearly 19,000 traditional rice varieties and estimated that India once had as many as 200,000 indigenous varieties. Besides being vital to India’s cultural diversity, indigenous rice varieties are also more resilient to climate change. “Traditional varieties have the capability of beating weather vagaries, which have become the norm today,” said Khan.

Fortunately, Khan’s three teenage children have expressed interest in his work. “My son, who is 14, planted eight varieties this time choosing seeds on his own,” he says, with a hint of pride. He recently received a grant of Rs 500,000 from the National Bank for Agriculture and Rural Development (NABARD), which has facilitated his efforts towards the museum. Apart from retailing through Sahaja Samrudha Organics’ retail outlets, he also sells seeds at home and in organic markets in the towns of Mandya and Mysore. Looking ahead, Khan hopes that he can spread awareness about indigenous rice to school children. He would also like to start a training centre for people who want to learn about conservation techniques.

In the meanwhile, Khan hopes to find financial support to maintain his website and work on the museum. It would also help him with necessary infrastructure such as a solar freezer to conserve seeds for subsequent seasons, in case of a drought. His conservation efforts now also include finger millet or ragi  – he has collected over 100 varieties of this hardy, nutritious grain.

Even though Khan laments that India still has a long way to go, his pioneering achievement is certainly beginning to pay off. He estimates that at least 30 percent of farmers in his village have started growing traditional varieties.  Somesh Basavanna, the chief executive officer of Sahaja Samrudha Organics, attests to his growing fame among conscious consumers. “We have many customers who enjoy traditional rice variants that also trigger a sense of nostalgia in them. In fact, they ask us about these variants and our go-to person is Khan,” he said.