The Better India · 5 hours ago

Inspired by a Japanese Book, Kerala‘s Usha Soolapani Is Helping Farmers Save India’s Forgotten Rice

When Usha Soolapani read *The One-Straw Revolution* as a young agriculture officer in Kerala, something shifted in how she understood her work - and her responsibility. Over the decades that followed, she traveled across six Indian states with colleagues from Thanal, tracking down farmers who had quietly kept ancestral rice seeds alive in clay pots and kitchen rafters, often unknown to the wider world. What they built together - community seed banks, Rice Diversity Blocks, seed festivals where elders shared stories over the fragrance of freshly cooked rice - now connects more than 30,000 farmers preserving over 1,000 indigenous varieties. "Paddy is not just a crop," Usha says. "It is an ecosystem that sustains people, communities, and biodiversity." Her story is a reminder that conservation is rarely dramatic; sometimes it looks like a woman listening carefully to what has almost been forgotten, and deciding it is worth saving.