BIHAN MELA

Since 2019, members of the Kondh tribe in Odisha have added one more event to their calendar of festivals and celebrations called Bihan Mela
It is literally the seed festival.
It includes both hybrid and indigenous varieties of paddy, millets, maize and sorghum.

How is it celebrated?

Women, who are at the helm of this festival, carefully collect seeds of the indigenous varieties and store them in earthen pots.
Then, on a designated day in December, they decorate the pots with red and white motifs, place them in a bamboo basket and carry it on head to the village where the fair is being organised.
Along the way, they are accompanied by men beating drums and other traditional instruments.
The fair mimics a traditional market where farmers used to exchange seeds.

Significance of the festival:

Farmers in the region are mostly marginal and depend on the monsoon rains.
In recent years, they have seen repeated crop failures either due to erratic rainfall or pest attacks.
Since the Green Revolution, farmers in the region have abandoned native crops and varieties that are naturally resistant to pests and better suited to the region’s climate.
Even in dongars or hilltops, where families used to practice mixed cropping until recently, have shifted to monoculture cash crops like cashew.
This has not only affected their food and nutritional security, but also degraded the soil and made the farmers more vulnerable to crop loss.
The seed festival was thus introduced to help farmers return to their traditional ways of farming like mixed-cropping.

Kondh Tribe:

The Khonds are the largest tribal group in Odisha.

They are a designated Scheduled Tribe in: