Traditionally, hand impounding is the primary step for processing Little millet, Foxtail millet, Kodo millet, Proso millet, and Paddy; while Pearl millet, Sorghum, Finger millet are manually ground to make flour to make bread or consumed as whole grain when made into cooked meal. Farmers say that Kodo millet being a hard grain, is most difficult to de-husk as it has several seed coats, but it is worth the effort as its cooked meal is considered to be most tasty of all the millet. However, Little millet, Proso millet and Foxtail millet are the easiest to process wherein they are impounded 3-4 times in the traditional stone pounder. The husk does not go waste, especially of the millets, which is soaked in water and fed to their farm animals. Of late, in some regions (like in Tamil Nadu) millets are parboiled and sun dried for a week before de-husking the hard grains like Dryland paddy, Proso millet, and Kodo millet which enables easier removal of husk and enhances the storability of grains.

Further, people take Finger millet, Sorghum and Pearl millet to local flourmills, in spite their observation that the mechanical milling process affects the taste, nutritional status and keeping quality of millets, while their traditionally milled products retain more nutrients, the flavour and tastes. However, in the case of small millets as the mechanical de-husking and milling, results in higher losses due to their small grain size these are traditionally de-husked by manually impounding and milled by hand rotated stone grinder. The experiences with local food processing unity set up by tribal community in Maharashtra working with ADS, the Timbaktu Collective in the Anantapur district and the Millet complex and Cafa Ethnic established by the DDS-Sangham in Andhra Pradesh are a bold step towards the efforts to revive the local food habits.