Nearly 10 million hectares of millet farms have been rendered fallow over the last three decades. This has happened as more and more area has come under rice and wheat cultivation. That this should be stopped is no longer an issue but a clear mandate. It is critical to look at how the promotion of certain kinds of crops has led to this scenario. At another level, there is an increased corporate interest in millets. These are trends that point to a danger of corporatisation of millets, the crops that were seen till recently as the Farmers Food Sovereignty Crop.

It is in this context the vision of MINI is to bring back the crop diversity and farmers seeds. The Seed autonomy becomes far more important in a globalizing world, shrinking national boundaries and disappearing sovereignties.

In an effort to reclaim agricultural biodiversity, several communities are remarkably taking control over their food sovereignty. Over the time several grass roots initiatives by NGOs have established village level Seed Banks in hundreds of villages and retrieved the landraces, which has been obliterated by so-called modern agricultural practices.