It was an innocuous statistic that changed the course of ecologist Debal Deb’s life in 1995. Deb, now 51, worked at the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) back then, and came across a study which reported that the gene pool of almost 90 per cent of local rice varieties in the country had been wiped out since the Green Revolution in 1965.u00a0“Influential organisations, like the WWF, spent millions on saving ‘charismatic mega fauna’ (the tiger and rhinoceros) but didn’t care about rice seeds.”

Since 1997, Orissa-based ecologist Debal Deb (second from right) trains farmers from West Bengal, Orissa, Jharkhand, Assam, Bihar, Maharashtra and Tamil Nadu to sow rare folk rice seed varieties. At his seed farm in Bankura district near Jharkhand, he has conserved 600 rice varieties that would have otherwise been extinct. Pic Courtesy/Debal Deb