Rice you can eat without cooking gets popular in Karimnagar

Now, a paddy variety named Boka Saul from Assam, which can be consumed without cooking, is slowly gaining popularity in Karimnagar.

Karimnagar: The travails of cooking rice is known to everyone familiar with cooking. Washing the rice, putting it in the cooker and waiting for it get cooked are daily practices in most homes.

Now, a paddy variety named Boka Saul from Assam, which can be consumed without cooking, is slowly gaining popularity in Karimnagar. What one has to do is soak the rice in water for 40 minutes to make it suitable for consumption. Three glasses of water should be added for a glass of rice. The Boka Saul variety, also known in the market as ‘magic rice’, is being cultivated by a farmer Garampalli Srikanth, who is cultivating a number of varieties by following natural farming methods in his four acres of land in Sriramulapalle of Illandakunta mandal.

The rare variety crop is being cultivated in one and half gunta of land for the purpose of seed. Srikanth, who has been practising agriculture since 2000, introduced the Boka Saul variety two years ago. With rich fibre content and other medicinal values, the variety is said to help people to be active through the day, Srikanth told Telangana Today.

This paddy variety is also known as the Assam variety since it has widely been cultivated in some pockets of Assam. When compared to other varieties, it takes more time for the yield. Against the normal variety yield of in about 140 to 150 days, the Boka Saul variety takes 185 days. The yield per acre is also less, with only four to five bags produced in an acre of land as against 30 bags normal varieties, Srikanth said.

Srikanth is cultivating about 150 different paddy varieties such as Black Rice, Red Rice, Mapillai Samba, Manipuri Black, Ambai Mohar, Kulkar, Navara, Mysore Mallika, Rakthashali, Malsundari, Klapathi, 16 varieties of Basmati and others.

An intermediate dropout, Srikanth continued his family’s tradition of farming, but instead of cultivating routine crops, he decided to sow unique varieties and adopted natural farming methods after being inspired by Shubash Palekar in 2011.

Srikanth also collects different varieties of seeds by touring different parts of the country, for which he has so far visited nine States. Besides cultivating different varieties of paddy which could be used to cure different diseases, he provides them to patients suffering from different diseases such as diabetes, blood pressure, PCOD, obesity, cancer and others.

He also educates other farmers who want to practice natural farming methods.