• If Indian farmers were to switch from growing rice and wheat to ‘alternative cereals,’ such as maize, sorghum, and millet, it could reduce the demand for irrigation water by 33%.

• This could also improve nutritional availability to consumers, according to an analysis by researchers.

• For their analysis, the scientists considered water as well as cereal-production data from 1996-2009.
• Because actual water consumption data was not available, they used a proxy — Crop Water Requirement (CWR), which is the product of the water required by a crop and the harvested area — to calculate water consumption in every district in this period.
• In this time, cereal production grew by 230%. Although the combined production of alternative cereals was larger than that of wheat in the 1960s, their relative contribution to the cereal supply has steadily dwindled.
• Yet, alternative cereals disproportionately account for the supply of protein, iron, and zinc among kharif crops.
• At the same time, total CWR demand for Indian cereal production increased from 482 to 632 km3 per year during the study period.
• The nub was that rice is the least water-efficient cereal when it came to producing nutrients and was the main driver in increasing irrigation stresses.
• Replacing rice with maize, finger millet, pearl millet, or sorghum could save irrigation and improving production of nutrients such as iron by 27% and zinc by 13%, according to the report
• Alternative cereal production can help distribute nutrient production across the country and reduce the impact of a single local climate shock to national grain production.

The Hindu