Seeds of resilience: Inside India’s quiet revolution of community seed banks

On the International Day for Biological Diversity in May 2025, the farmers, researchers, and civil-society groups joined an online discussion hosted by the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) to showcase India’s community seed banks. “While there is biodiversity all around us, what nourishes us is the biodiversity on our plates,” says Vibha Varshney, who heads the Biodiversity and Food programme at the CSE. She added, “These community seed banks hold the genetic wealth that can keep that plate full even when the climate turns hostile.” 

A counter narrative to agricultural uniformity

CSE’s freshly released report, Climate-Resilient Seeds: The story of community seed banks in India, estimates that the country’s informal seed savers now steward at least 887 traditional varieties across seventy-one crop species, a figure compiled from twenty-two banks and two individual custodians in fifteen states. Karnataka alone accounts for 186 varieties, closely followed by Nagaland’s 156 and Odisha’s 152. “Diversity-based farming is not nostalgia; it is a real solution for a climate-risked world,” the report stresses.

How do the seed banks work?

Most banks now operate as webs of ten or so households connected by what farmers call the “five-kilo-take, ten-kilo-return” ethic. After every harvest, seed borrowers bring back double the quantity they received, ensuring constant renewal. Others, especially in tribal belts, rely on pure gifting; a few women’s cooperatives in Gujarat and Maharashtra sell a fraction of surplus seed at a small premium so the bank can buy steel drums or moisture metres. “Improvement doesn’t come just from infrastructure,” explains Sahaja Samrudha founder G. Krishna Prasad, adding, “It’s about creating trust, and that begins with recognising seed savers as ‘custodians of biodiversity.” 

In the northeastern hills, the Chizami Women’s Seed Bank holds over 150 local rice and vegetable varieties. Its governing rules give widows and marginal farmers first pick of seed—a crucial buffer in a landscape where markets are distant and landslides frequent. Similar women-led systems anchor banks in Odisha, Gujarat and Madhya Pradesh. “Women are the primary custodians of selection and storage knowledge, and their leadership increases community engagement,” the report finds. 

Climate traits written in grain

Walk through the seed jars, and India’s climate atlas comes alive. Deep-water rice such as Rakthasali and Kuttadan ride out week-long submergence; finger-millet landraces like Bhadaee withstand forty-degree heat; paunchhi rice bends rather than breaks in cyclonic winds; and bottle gourds cured with turmeric sprout in soils laced with tidal salt. “These seeds let farmers bounce back after a flood, a drought, or a pest wave,” Varshney says. “They are the first insurance payout—paid in grain, not rupees.” 

The human stories behind statistics

Vijay Jardhari, patriarch of Uttarakhand’s forty-year-old Beej Bachao Andolan, likes to hold up a wooden box he calls the bijunda—a farmer’s personal seed chest. “The bijunda is insurance against hunger, inflation, and climate shocks,” he told participants. “A mountain farmer would die but never eat the seed meant for the next sowing.” 

Down in Maharashtra’s Western Ghats, forest-regeneration activist Bharat Mansata reminds visitors that his Vanvadi collective now harvests food from eighty forest species. “The government must realise that this is genetic wealth,” he says. “Tragically, it is often available to large buyers before it is accessible to small farmers.” 

Headwinds: money, policy, and climate extremes

Yet all custodians report similar hurdles. Banks depend on NGO grants or goodwill sales; few can afford cold rooms. Heatwaves waver germination rates; erratic rains shrink multiplication harvests. Younger cultivators, seduced by glossy catalogues and credit-linked hybrid packets, dismiss landraces as “old-fashioned,” CSE researcher Shimali Chauhan warns.

What would it take to scale up?

CSE’s report calls for a five-point agenda. It urges formal recognition of seed savers as biodiversity custodians; public grants for low-energy storage and on-farm viability testing; inclusion of traditional seed lots in schemes such as the National Food Security Mission; consumer education that links taste with diversity; and an open-source digital atlas that matches farmers who need seed with banks that hold it. “It’s not just about building storage spaces; it’s about creating resilient, people-centred ecosystems where knowledge and local stewardship are valued,” the report concludes.

Why this matters beyond the village gate

India already boasts the world’s largest formal gene repository, the National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, and a new national gene bank is in the works. But Jardhari offers a simple reality check: “Seeds locked in freezers cannot sprout on a hungry hillside.” Bharat Mansata puts it differently: “Seed sovereignty is food sovereignty. If every tehsil had a community bank of traditional varieties, no cyclone or market crash could starve us.” 

Their conviction finds empirical backing. During the 2009 Himalayan drought, millet yields from community-saved seed hardly dipped even as commercial rice failed, CSE notes. And when Cyclone Phailin flooded Odisha in 2013, farmers who had borrowed deep-water paddy from local banks harvested grain where certified varieties drowned. 

A seed for the future

As the webinar wound down, Varshney held up a tiny bottle containing speckled finger millet. “This weighs scarcely twenty grams, but it carries four thousand years of experimentation and knowledge that belongs to us all,” she said. The camera panned across dozens of similar jars, each a distillation of collective memory and ecological adaptation. In those humble containers lies perhaps the most robust answer yet to India’s intertwined crises of climate, nutrition and rural livelihoods.

Whether policymakers heed that answer may decide whose crops flourish on the subcontinent’s increasingly erratic monsoon—and whose plates stay resilient the next time the skies refuse to oblige.