Koraput district household economy primarily depends on agriculture, in which the cultivation plays a vital role. The district topography is a very peculiar distribution of the land mass. During the kharif season, most of the Koraput district became covered in greenery through the cultivation of various crops, especially finger millet in uplands. But the only constraint is erratic rainfall hamper the production of millets. Despite lots of difficulty for the cultivation of millets in Koraput, the district contributes a major portion, around 65160 hectors with the production 8.44 qtls/ha (Data source Department of Agriculture 2013), of the area under millet cultivation. Nowadays, the global food system faces unparal-leled challenges of hunger, undernutrition and malnutrition, and inadequate availability and unaffordability of healthy nutritive diets. In this backdrop, a neglected underutilized crop like millet has received renewed policy primacy by governments in many states as well as by the central government in India for achieving nutritional and income security of the millet farming community of the country, who are the custodians of our diet, and for the high resilience of the crop against climate vulnerability of the farming sector. The Government of Odisha has given special emphasis on millet cultivation and introduced the “Odisha Millets Mission (OMM)”, presently renamed as “Odisha Shree Anna Abhiyan (OSAA)”, as a rejuvenation effort in this direction. This supportive government policy gave a clear-cut road map for the expansion of millet cultivation and enhanced the millet farmer household income. The present study intends to determine the household income along with the consumption of millets of millet farmers in the Koraput block of Koraput district, as it tops among the blocks in the district in terms of area under millet cultivation and number of households engaged in production of the crop. The high suitability of the land of the block is reported to be the major factor in extensive millet production in the block. The block is selected by following a purposive sampling technique.

Koraput, Economic Development, Nutritional Security, Millet