Hyderabad-based startup Millet Bank features in Niti Aayog’s Compendium

City-based startup Millet Bank has been featured in Niti Aayog’s compendium of '75 Agri Entrepreneurs and Innovators' from across the country

Hyderabad: City-based startup Millet Bank has been featured in Niti Aayog’s compendium of ’75 Agri Entrepreneurs and Innovators’ from across the country under the Agriculture sector for its efforts in promotion of millets and supporting farmers.

Established in 2021, Millet Bank is working with millet farmers and micro processing units in formulating, branding and marketing of millet based products.

Millet Bank portfolio of products includes both ready to eat (RTE) and ready to cook (RTC). In less than 18 months of its inception, Millet Bank has helped over 500 farmers and rural entrepreneurs in post harvesting and food processing.

The idea was to help promote consumption of millets, which are nutritious among urban people, especially youth and children.

This apart, onus was onto support farmers to take up extensive cultivation of different millets and create sustainable ecosystem, said Vishala Reddy Vuyyala, founder of Millet Bank.

“There are many companies, which produce millet based products and want farmers to produce millets extensively. But the need of the hour was an integrated value chain and e-commerce platform and we are working on this aspect,” said Vishala Reddy.

As part of promotion of millets, the startup was now supplying gift hampers for weddings, social meetings, corporate programmes, business events and institutions as a means to help farmers and rural artisans. These gift hampers include nutritious food made of millets, farm crafts, sustainable cutlery, spices, Ayurveda products and others, she said.

Under this initiative, Millet Bank is working in coordination with Cherial artisans from Telangana, and many others from Andhra Pradesh, Odisha, Karnataka and others. Already, 15,000 baskets have been delivered at different events.

“The idea was to promote distribution of wealth. When an individual buys a gift from a store and e-commerce portal, one particular company gets benefited. But through our initiative, if one purchases Rs.1000 gift hamper, about eight artisans and farmers get benefited” she said.

Niti Aayog prepared the compendium as part of the ‘Azadi ka Amrit Mahotsav‘ to commemorate 75 Agri Entrepreneurs and Innovators working towards revolutionizing the agriculture and allied sectors with their innovative and transformative ideas.

The organisations and startups selected were from different sectors, including agriculture (44), horticulture (8), dairy (3), animal husbandry (5), fisheries (6) and others (9), Niti Aayog CEO Parameswaran Iyer said in his note in the compendium.