She scatters seed, continuing a sentence
By hands returning home to the earth.
Grains that do not beg, that bend but do not bow.
That outlived the kings who taxed them,
The empires that forgot their names.
EdexLive honours Raimati Ghiuria, Devi of the Harvest.
The furrows in her field a print of her palm,
A map of labour, a record no ledger can hold.
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Along the ridges of Koraput, where the hills whisper of rain and seed, Raimati Ghiuria shapes a future from grains long forgotten. Known affectionately as the “Mandia Rani,” she has conserved around thirty varieties of millet and more than seventy traditional paddy landraces. That work began quietly in her village of Nuaguda and steadily found purchase at national festivals and policy forums.
Her lab is the earth, her curriculum the seed catalogs of tribes whose foods once powered entire seasons. She organized farmer-producer companies, trained roughly 2,500 smallholders in seed multiplication and line-transplanting techniques, and helped a flock of women farmers claim agency through harvests and value-addition work.
At Bamandei Farmers Producer Company she scaled her vision: bio-fertilisers, millet procurement, the full supply chain from field to market. In 2024, at a convocation of OUAT, she received an honorary doctorate, conferred in a ceremony attended by President Droupadi Murmu.
Recognition arrived as supplement, not motive. For Raimati, the real measure lies in a laddu made of finger-millet, sold somewhere far from Koraput; in the smile of a farmer who rediscovered pride in the crop once deemed poor.
Her place in workshops, millet summits, even the G20-linked dialogues turns the local into the national, the ancestral into the avant-garde. She has shown that a seed can carry memory, resistance and renewal. Millets no longer beg for attention under her care. They bend, yes, but they do endure.
Raimati works at a speed slower than the factory line, and that is deliberate. She speaks of seasons, not quarters; of taste, not trends; of heritage, not hype. Hers is a long view. When others chase yield she plants resilience. When others ignore diversity she preserves it. The fields she tends are living archives.
Through Raimati Ghiuria, the food of Odisha’s hills has regained voice. Each grain stands as testament to what remains when everything else has changed. She holds that continuity.
The Mandia Rani honours the pulse of land and culture in each husk and each grain.
