In a mud-walled room in a village in West Bengal, 312 clay pots line the shelves. Each holds a different variety of rice, some with names that only a handful of elderly farmers still remember.
The seed library works like any other: farmers borrow a kilo and return two after harvest. The extra seed goes to the next borrower.
Flavour, resilience and memory
Several varieties tolerate salt water or flooding better than modern hybrids, which has made them newly valuable after recent cyclones. Others are prized for aroma or for the festival dishes they are traditionally used in.
Young farmers now record every variety’s behaviour in a shared notebook: days to harvest, height, yield and taste. It is slowly becoming a field guide that no laboratory could have written.
