Debal Deb’s Seeds Are More Than a Conservation Project: They Are a Lesson in India’s Food Security
In India, food security is often discussed in terms of procurement, fertiliser, irrigation, storage and the size of the foodgrain buffer. Yet there is another, quieter foundation beneath all of this: the seed.
Few people have made that argument as persistently as ecologist and farmer conservationist Dr Debal Deb. For nearly three decades, Deb has worked to conserve India's indigenous rice diversity, not in a conventional laboratory alone, but by keeping seeds alive in fields and returning them to farmers.
His work offers an important lesson at a time when Indian agriculture is facing climate uncertainty, declining biodiversity and growing pressure to produce more food with fewer natural resources.
A scientist who chose the field over the laboratory
Deb, a biologist with a PhD in ecology, completed postdoctoral research at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru, and was a Fulbright scholar at the University of California, Berkeley. He left his professional career in 1996 to focus on conserving vanishing folk crop varieties.
In 1997, he established Vrihi, a non governmental rice seed bank for farmers. The Sanskrit word Vrihi means rice. His approach was different from simply putting seeds into long term storage. He wanted farmers to continue cultivating them, exchanging them and adapting them to their own landscapes.
That philosophy eventually led to Basudha, his farm and conservation initiative in Odisha, where indigenous rice varieties are cultivated and maintained. Current documentation associated with Vrihi puts the collection at around 1,480 rice landraces, while the initiative has benefited more than 8,000 farmers over the years.
The numbers are impressive. But the real significance lies in what each seed represents.
Why saving a seed matters
A traditional rice variety is not simply another name for rice.
Different landraces have evolved and been selected over generations under different soil, rainfall, temperature and ecological conditions. Some can tolerate drought; others perform better under flooding, salinity or particular local conditions. The loss of such varieties means losing genetic characteristics that could become valuable as the climate changes.
This is why Deb's work has implications far beyond biodiversity.
Indian agriculture cannot afford to depend indefinitely on a narrow genetic base. A crop that performs exceptionally well under one set of conditions may become vulnerable when rainfall patterns change, temperatures rise or new pests and diseases emerge.
Genetic diversity is therefore a form of agricultural insurance.
A diverse seed pool gives farmers and plant breeders more options when conditions change.
From seed conservation to food security
There is an important distinction between food production and food security.
Producing large quantities of rice today does not automatically guarantee that the same production system will remain resilient tomorrow.
Food security requires availability, access and stability over time. That makes agricultural resilience crucial.
Deb's model addresses one part of that resilience by keeping locally adapted genetic material in circulation. Vrihi's seeds are distributed to farmers, and documentation on the community seed bank describes a seed loan model in which farmers return twice the quantity after harvest. This allows varieties to move between farmers rather than remaining locked inside a collection.
That is perhaps the most powerful idea in Deb's work: a seed is safest when it is not merely stored, but grown.
A seed sitting in a vault preserves genetic material. A seed cultivated by farmers preserves genetic material and knowledge when to sow it, how much water it needs, how it responds to local soil, how it should be harvested and how its seed should be saved for the next season.
The forgotten knowledge of Indian farmers
The Green Revolution transformed India's food system and played an enormous role in addressing food shortages. But the expansion of a smaller number of high yielding varieties also contributed to the decline of many traditional farmer varieties. Deb's research has documented the extraordinary diversity that existed historically, including thousands of rice landraces across regions such as Bengal.
The lesson should not be that India must choose between modern agriculture and traditional agriculture. That would be a false choice.
The better lesson is that modern agricultural science should not allow traditional genetic resources to disappear.
High yielding varieties, biotechnology, irrigation, mechanisation and improved agronomy have important roles. So do indigenous varieties, farmer knowledge and ecological diversity. A resilient agricultural policy should bring these strands together rather than treating them as competing ideologies.
What India can learn from Debal Deb
The first lesson is that biodiversity is infrastructure.
We routinely invest in roads, warehouses, irrigation systems and digital agricultural platforms. Seed diversity deserves similar strategic thinking because it underpins the productive capacity of agriculture itself.
Second, conservation must be decentralised. Farmers should not merely be recipients of improved seeds. They can also be custodians of agricultural genetic diversity.
Third, public policy needs to value crops beyond their immediate market price. A traditional variety that is not commercially attractive today may contain traits that become invaluable tomorrow.
Fourth, seed conservation should be linked to climate adaptation. India already faces increasing weather variability. The answer cannot be entirely dependent on technological fixes after a crisis occurs. Maintaining diverse crops before the crisis arrives is a form of preparedness.
Finally, Deb's work reminds us that agriculture is not only about yields. It is also about knowledge, culture, ecology and autonomy.
The policy challenge
The larger challenge is to take this idea beyond individual conservationists.
India needs stronger community seed banks, farmer to farmer seed networks, support for participatory breeding and systematic documentation of indigenous varieties. Agricultural universities and research institutions should work more closely with farmers who have maintained these crops for generations.
The National Plant Genome Savior Award, which Vrihi received in 2009, recognised the importance of this kind of conservation.But recognition must be followed by sustained institutional support.
Deb's experience is also a reminder that conservation cannot become another exercise in collecting genetic material and keeping it away from the communities that created and maintained it.
A seed is a promise to the future
There is something almost philosophical about Debal Deb's work. A seed appears insignificant. It can fit in the palm of a hand. Yet inside it is the possibility of an entire harvest and, in the case of traditional varieties, generations of experimentation by farmers.
India's food security debate often looks at the next harvest. Deb's work asks us to look further ahead.
The question is not simply how much rice India can grow this year. It is whether Indian farmers will still possess enough genetic diversity to grow food under conditions that may look very different twenty or fifty years from now.
That is why saving indigenous seeds is not a nostalgic return to the past. It is an investment in the future.
Debal Deb's greatest contribution may therefore be a simple one: he has reminded India that food security begins long before a grain reaches the warehouse. It begins with keeping enough different seeds alive in the soil, in farmers' hands and in our collective memory.
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