PIB TrackerCFTRI millet Centre of Excellence drives global adoption
India's first dedicated millet Centre of Excellence links research to markets, with a new training hostel under RKVY.
What happened
- The Union Minister for Science & Technology visited the country's first dedicated Centre of Excellence for Millets at the Central Food Technological Research Institute (CFTRI), Mysuru, and described it as "possibly the first of its kind globally".
- He performed the Bhoomi Pooja for a 30-room single-occupancy trainee hostel at CFTRI's M.G. Halli campus, built under the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) and meant to house around 50 trainees, farmers, FPOs and self-help-group members, with completion expected within a year.
- He noted that millet recipes developed with Indian technology are now served by international food chains, including McDonald's — evidence that the Centre's innovations have entered global supply lines.
- The Centre is now extending the same processing approach to "Kalari", a traditional cheese product from Udhampur in Jammu & Kashmir, to develop sustainable food recipes.
- The facility is backed by ₹20 crore under RKVY and handles all nine recognised millets in a single integrated system.
Background & context
Millets are a group of small-seeded, drought-hardy cereal grasses that India has cultivated for millennia and that the Government now brands as "Shree Anna" — literally "the foremost grain". India is the world's largest producer of millets and was the prime mover behind the United Nations declaring 2023 the International Year of Millets, a proposal India sponsored to push these climate-resilient grains back into global diets. The CFTRI Centre of Excellence is the food-technology arm of that wider campaign: where the policy push created demand, the Centre supplies the processing science that lets millets compete with wheat and rice on convenience and shelf life.
CFTRI itself is a constituent laboratory of the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR), established at Mysuru in 1950 as one of independent India's earliest food-research institutions. It operates under the administrative umbrella of CSIR, which is itself under the Ministry of Science & Technology. Placing a millet Centre of Excellence inside CFTRI ties the millet mission to a public research lab with seven decades of food-processing capability, rather than building capacity from scratch. The chain of administration therefore runs: Ministry of Science & Technology → CSIR → CFTRI → the Centre of Excellence for Millets; while the funding instrument, RKVY, sits under the Ministry of Agriculture & Farmers Welfare — a deliberate cross-ministry stitch between farm policy and food technology.
The Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY) that funds both the Centre's equipment and the new hostel is the umbrella scheme that anchors this announcement. RKVY began in 2007 as an outcome of the National Development Council's push to raise farm growth, giving States flexible, top-up funding to plan agriculture spending around local priorities. It has since been recast — the agriculture-infrastructure and allied-sector lines were reorganised under the broader "RKVY" and "Krishishonnati Yojana" family of central schemes, and it is implemented as a centrally sponsored scheme with a Centre–State cost share. Using RKVY rather than a science grant is the policy tell: the Government is treating millet processing as an agriculture value-chain investment, not a laboratory curiosity, so the money flows through the farm-development pipe and reaches FPOs, self-help groups and trainees on the ground.
Separately, the millet campaign sits in a wider basket of recent measures: the rebranding of millets as "Shree Anna" announced in the Union Budget, the designation of a national institute as a global centre of excellence for millet research, and the inclusion of millets in the public distribution and mid-day-meal supply in several States. The CFTRI Centre of Excellence is the food-technology limb of that family — its sibling efforts handle seeds, agronomy and procurement, while CFTRI owns the post-harvest, processing and product-development end.
For Prelims
- Entity: Centre of Excellence for Millets — at CFTRI, Mysuru; described as "possibly the first of its kind globally".
- CFTRI full form: Central Food Technological Research Institute — a CSIR constituent laboratory at Mysuru, founded 1950.
- Funding: ₹20 crore under the Rashtriya Krishi Vikas Yojana (RKVY); the trainee hostel is also under RKVY.
- Processing capability: seven processing lines + a dedicated laboratory; end-to-end primary and secondary processing of all major millets — cleaning, dehulling, polishing, sorting, plus flakes, extruded items, baked goods and semolina.
- Throughput: automated, 300 kg to 1,000 kg per hour; cleaning 60–70 tonnes/day, milling 12–15 tonnes/day; outputs flour, semolina (sooji and rava) and bran.
- Shelf life: extends millet-flour shelf life from about one month to nearly ten months — the core technical problem the Centre solves, since rapid rancidity has long blocked millet flour from organised retail.
- Coverage: processes all nine recognised millet varieties in a single system.
- Hostel: 30 single-occupancy rooms at the M.G. Halli campus, for ~50 trainees/farmers/FPOs/SHGs, completion within a year.
- "Shree Anna": the Government's branding for millets; India led the UN International Year of Millets, 2023.
The full set of nine recognised millets (so "how many / match the pairs" questions survive): the nine commonly listed under the millet/Shree Anna basket are the two major millets — jowar (sorghum) and bajra (pearl millet) — together with ragi (finger millet) and a cluster of small millets: foxtail (kangni/kakum), little (kutki), kodo, proso (cheena/barri) and barnyard (sanwa). Buckwheat (kuttu) and amaranth (chaulai) are often promoted alongside millets as "pseudo-millets" for nutritional and fasting use, but they are botanically grains/seeds of broadleaf plants, not true grass cereals — a common point of confusion.
The millet crop, for the commodity checklist: millets are predominantly Kharif crops in India, sown with the monsoon and harvested in autumn, though some are grown in the Rabi and summer seasons in pockets. They are largely rain-fed, short-duration and low-input. On geography, India's major millet-growing belt runs through the drier interiors: Rajasthan is the leading producer of bajra (pearl millet), Maharashtra and Karnataka are major jowar (sorghum) growers, and Karnataka is the principal ragi (finger millet) State, with Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Tamil Nadu, Gujarat, Madhya Pradesh and Uttar Pradesh also significant. Several millets are notified under Minimum Support Price (MSP) — jowar, bajra and ragi are among the MSP-covered coarse cereals — which gives procurement a price floor. Their principal end-uses span human food (flour, semolina, flakes, porridge, baked and extruded snacks, the formats this Centre produces), cattle and poultry feed, fodder from the stalk, and increasingly health-food and export products. Their nutritional draw — high fibre, protein, iron, calcium (ragi especially) and a low glycaemic index — is what makes them attractive to diabetes-conscious and health-led markets.
Why it matters
Millets are nutritionally dense and climate-resilient — they tolerate drought, poor soils and high temperatures, need far less water than paddy, and suit rain-fed and tribal farming systems. Yet their share of Indian diets collapsed over decades as subsidised wheat and rice dominated the public distribution system and as millet flour's short shelf life made it commercially awkward. The problem the Centre directly addresses is the post-harvest and processing bottleneck: without dehulling, polishing and stabilisation technology, millets stay a niche, hard-to-store grain. By moving flour shelf life from roughly one month to nearly ten, and by offering ready-to-use formats (flakes, extruded snacks, baked goods, semolina), the Centre makes millets viable for organised retail, exports and quick-service restaurants — the McDonald's example is the proof of concept. The training hostel adds the human side: equipping farmers, FPOs and SHGs to run small processing units themselves, so value-addition stays closer to the producer rather than leaking to distant processors. In short, it converts a policy slogan into a working farm-to-shelf value chain.
Compared with a conventional rice or wheat mill, a millet processing line is harder to standardise: the nine millets differ in seed size, hull toughness and oil content, so a single facility that can clean, dehull, polish and stabilise all of them — rather than one dedicated to a single grain — is the genuine advance here. That versatility is also why the Centre can pivot its food-technology approach to an unrelated product like J&K's Kalari cheese: the underlying capability is generic food processing and shelf-life science, applicable across India's neglected regional foods. The model the release showcases is therefore less about millets alone and more about a public lab acting as a shared product-development and training resource for under-commercialised Indian foods.