Sravan Kumar Roy went from Bihar’s Darbhanga to Tamil Nadu’s Thanjavur to study food technology. Despite their seeming differences, the two places are tied together by water — Darbhanga has wetlands and numerous rivers and ponds; Thanjavur is on the banks of the Cauvery. Both are known for rich cultivation, a lot of it being rice.
At the National Institute of Food Technology, Entrepreneurship and Management, where Roy did a BTech between 2009 and 2013, he was nicknamed ‘Makhana Man’. “I introduced my teachers and batchmates to this ‘wonder food’. Except for the four north Indian students on my campus, no one had heard about makhana. Everyone else only spoke about the cashew trees on campus,” he recalls. Foxnuts were then eaten only in north India during Hindu fasts, along with sabudana (sago) and kuttu ka atta (buckwheat flour).
Today, Roy owns a business that retails from Darbhanga and online, producing 22 items from makhana, from the traditional kheer to the innovative dosa and idli powder, to cater to customers down south, and even a 100% makhana cookie for the urban health food market.
The Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR) estimates that Bihar produces 10,000 tonnes of makhana per annum, about 90% of the country’s total. India contributes to 80% of the world’s demand. The prickly water lily, from which the seed is harvested, is spread across more than 15,000 hectares in Bihar, and traditionally grows wild.
About five lakh families, mostly from the Mallah community, are involved in its processing. Nine districts in the Mithila region now grow it for production: Darbhanga, Madhubani, Purnea, Katihar, Saharsa, Supaul, Araria, Kishanganj, and Sitamarhi.
Makhana, sold in the international wholesale market at about ₹8,000 per kg, up from ₹1,000 about 10 years ago, is in high demand as a source of vegetarian protein in a world burdened by ‘meat guilt’ from animal cruelty and methane-related temperature rises. Indian wholesale markets sold makhana at ₹250 per kg a decade ago, with prices now at ₹1,400. However, rates are cyclical, with price increases during festivals, when demand goes up.
Mukhiya, the master of makhana
The people who harvest the seeds though — traditionally boatmen and fisherfolk — say the government offers them little support, and they now want a minimum support price (MSP) to ensure that the crop is sustainable for cultivation.
The Bihar government runs the Makhana Development Scheme that gives a 75% subsidy on the Suvarna Vaidehi variety of seeds, calculated at ₹97,000 per hectare.
Also, makhana is a product approved under the Union government’s One District One Product scheme, under which subsidies are provided to food processors for branding, marketing, and developing infrastructure.
Vinod Mukhiya, 42, is a landless farmer belonging to the Mallah community. He cultivates makhana across the five acres he has leased and partners with landowning farmers in about 20 acres. He also works as a farmhand, something he has done for the last 25 years.
When raised for cultivation, sowing is done in December and January, transplantation in February and March, and harvest between July and October. The wild variety too is harvested at the same time. “The seeds fall into water. We collect them from the bottom of ponds, grade them, and dry them in the shade. Women in our homes roast the seed and break the shell off. They take out the lava (the white food commonly seen) and sell it. Now, makhana has a market,” he says.
Tall and lean, Mukhiya does not find it hard to handle the Euryale ferox, the lily’s scientific term, named after the Greek goddess, Euryale, born of a sea goddess and god, with hair of snakes, protruding teeth, and tongue hanging out. The plant, with dark pink flowers, has thorns all over. Only trained workers like Mukhiya are able to approach it. Workers use countrymade boats to navigate the large leaves.
‘Makhane ke patte se mooh pochke aao (Go wipe your face with makhana leaves)’ is an old saying of the Mithila region used on someone to check their ego or loose talk. “Workers who don’t approach the plant carefully get wounded. It needs training to transplant and harvest, especially in big ponds. We have been doing this from childhood,” Mukhiya adds.
The Mallahs of Mithila are considered the original inhabitants of this region. Kamala, a Mallah woman, sells makhana at the Darbhanga market. She pops it at home and brings it here. “I have been doing this since childhood,” she says. Women play an important role in increasing the earnings of a family. Farmers sell unprocessed, ungraded makhana seeds at ₹50-₹200 per kg. The moment the shell is removed, the price climbs to ₹400-₹800. For first-grade makhana lava, farmers can demand up to ₹1,100-₹1,250.
“We do not get enough support from the government,” Mukhiya says, adding that cooperative societies, formed to help Mallahs cultivate makhana and grow fish in public ponds, are not working in their favour. Though rights to farm and harvest are given only to Mallahs, landowners most often maintain control. “We go for popping work to Assam and Bengal, for landowners there. Here, cultivation is going down. Had we got enough support here, we wouldn’t have to leave Darbhanga.” He has heard of popping machines, but fears that they could take away the jobs of Mallah women.
Deft hands: A worker separates makhana into different grades at a unit. | Photo Credit: A.M. JIGEESH
Roy, the thinker and doer
Roy sits in his makhana processing unit situated in a lane near the Darbhanga Municipal Corporation office. The government has given him space to set up a corporate office in Patna. He says the video he made on his graduation project, a makhana popping machine, got about a million views on YouTube. It also won an award at the Tamil Nadu Agriculture University, where he presented it. While his machine wasn’t a commercial success, it laid the foundation for his start-up.
Roy opened his business in his grandmother’s name, Sumitra, and named the brand FT-MBA Makhanawala, where FT and MBA stand for the degrees he earned in Food Technology and Business Administration. He put an illustration of his face on the branding with the tagline, ‘Now the time is for Super Food, not for junk food’. He invested ₹20 lakh initially, but does not disclose what his turnover is. What he can say is that by the time it is packaged, makhana could retail for up to ₹2,000 per kg.
One of Roy’s hopes is to break the pattern of thinking in Bihar’s middle-class families. “If you are a man and not in a government job, people think either you or the institution you studied in has a problem,” he says, adding that his own family has held government jobs for a couple of generations. He secured corporate jobs soon after his graduation, including at Adani Wilmar. “I was earning well, but I always felt this was not for me.” Six years later, he decided to start his own business.
Roy’s business partner, Bhushan, is an engineer who also worked in corporate companies before deciding to come back to his hometown. “I wanted to create jobs for people in Bihar,” Bhushan says, citing the heavy migration the State sees. “During COVID, makhana got a bump for its nutritional value. Even Prime Minister Narendra Modi talked about it. We are now supplying to foreign and Indian clients,” he says, adding that what they source from farmers has almost doubled in the past couple of years.
China and Pakistan also produce makhana, and the seed has markets across the world, from America and Europe to the United Arab Emirates and Southeast Asia.
Roy and Bhushan mostly employ women in their three-room unit. They hope to hone the existing skills of those traditionally from families involved in picking and popping of makhana, but are also training other women.
Kanchan Devi, who is not from the Mallah community, says she has been working here for two years now. “I have learnt how to pop makhana, but I also want to learn other techniques in food processing,” she says.
Roy sees large corporates entering the market as a problem as they will be “purely profit-driven”. “We process 20 to 30 tonnes of makhana every month. We help some farmers lease ponds and cultivate makhana. These farmers have increased their volume of cultivation,” he says. Another problem, he says, is that value addition to the commodity takes place in urban centres. “Our effort is to ensure that value-added products go from here.”
Professors, the protein propounders
B.R. Jana, a senior scientist at ICAR-National Research Centre for Makhana, Darbhanga, says the crop is a good source of vegetarian protein, at 10%, and contains five of the nine amino acids. “There are also quercetin and kaempferol flavonoids, both of which protect against diabetes and obesity,” he says.
At the centre, Jana and other scientists are trying to cultivate the lily in managed ponds, so its hygiene can be ensured. They have shown that transplanted makhana grown in summer has a smaller yield than that of the rainy season, but has a higher protein content. “Organic makhana has a larger pop size, which opens doors to greater financial gain,” Jana says.
Vidya Nath Jha, a botanist and retired professor of Botany at Lalit Narayan Mithila University, has also spent many years researching makhana. At his modest home in Professor’s Colony in the suburbs of Darbhanga, he has found space for copious literature on makhana, in different languages. His PhD thesis was one of the first academic studies on the crop. In 1988, he had established that makhana contains “very good quality protein”.
He also published a book through ICAR on the crop. “It had articles from all parts of India where it is cultivated — from Kashmir to Manipur,” remembers U.N. Jha, Vidya Nath’s guide at the time. Jha talks of its cultural significance in the region. Makhana is derived from the Sanskrit words makh and anna, meaning the grains used during yagnas (rituals). “For the Mithila region, makhana is a must for all rituals,” he says.
Kojagra, a marital ritual observed on the full moon night of the Ashvin month in Mithila, has the bride’s parents send makhana as a gift to the groom’s house. This is distributed in the whole village. Recently, scientists at Banaras Hindu University found that the seed “has spermatogenic and aphrodisiac properties”, says Jha.
He speaks of makhana and fish breeding as being part of the pond ecosystem, each dependent on the other. Traditionally, farmers practise pisciculture, with makhana-picking as a side hustle. It was only when ICAR established a centre in Mithila that the fisherfolk began to see it was a crop. “Earlier, it was proposed that the GI tag be given to Bihar Makhana, but people protested and the government made it Mithila Makhana,” he adds.
FT-MBA Makhanawala founder Sravan Kumar Roy. | Photo Credit: A.M. JIGEESH
Big food firms and weather changes
Over the years, there has been a gradual decline in rains in this region. “Makhana does not require more than five feet of water, but now it is being cultivated in one or two feet of water, through transplantation. Women are involved in cultivation, too, as it can be handled easily in shallow water,” says Jha.
Paras Kumar Singh, a farmer and Jha’s student, now cultivates makhana in about 20 acres of wasteland, leasing it for ₹8,000 per acre per year. “The input cost per acre is about ₹40,000. In 2021, I got 800 kg per acre. In 2022, the production decreased, and the price per quintal was ₹4,000 (₹40 per kg) to ₹5,000 (₹50 per kg). In 2023, production was still low because of a drought, but prices started at ₹16,000 (₹160 for a kg) and went up to ₹22,000 per quintal (₹220 per kg),” says Singh.
Very few farmers are engaged in popping as they do not have the resources to stock or trade. “Farmers are not wealthy, but traders can bear the logistics costs,” he says. He has been trying to get workers to pop the seeds, but finds it hard as most women work at home on their own family’s crop. He hopes that someone will invent a popping machine as small farmers who are not from the Mallah community find the task hard.
Small-scale traders are also nervous about big food companies. Tarachand Amolak Chand Jain — a makhana wholesaler, supplier, and commission agent at the Darbhanga market — says unless the government provides an MSP, it will be difficult for them to continue the business.
Published - July 12, 2024 12:54 am IST
