Agriculture in India is over 5000 years old. Farmers have been into selective breeding and collecting enough seeds all these years to meet their planting requirement of the next crops. The very survival of Indian agriculture for centuries is a testimony to the sound wisdom on seed production and storage, the agrarian community has been nurturing over time. The past four decades have witnessed drastic changes in ways farmers manage their seed requirement. The decentralized seed production and distribution system practised over centuries by most of the farmers at village level has seen major reversal in terms of production and supply. With the advent of hybrid technology, the farmers are required to replenish seeds every season from external sources (such as research institutions, public and private sector seed producers) to harness the hybrid vigor. This has increased the productivity significantly, but at the same time, has increased farmers’ dependence on external agencies. As a result, the once informal and decentralized village seed industry has now been almost replaced by a highly centralized seed markets. However, it is almost impossible for the organized seed sector to meet farmers’ demand for the seed, considering the number of crops and varieties cultivated across the country. Thus, unscrupulous elements in the seed industry are active in supplying spurious seeds to gullible farmers causing heavy losses to the farmers and the country.

Many attempts are on to revive the age-old concept of seed self-sufficiency. In this context, the concept of ‘seed village’, which advocates village self-sufficiency in production and distribution of quality seeds, is fast gaining ground. Seed villages or village seed banks operate with utmost transparency, mutual trust and social responsibility of the seed-producing farmers towards seed-using fellow farmers, and under peer supervision. An attempt was made to promote the concept of village seed banks by the ICRISAT-led Watershed Consortium with the objective of ensuring quality seeds of improved/high yielding varieties for increasing productivity in farmers’ fields and creating incomegenerating opportunities for better livelihoods to villagers. Successful community initiatives were first documented by an in-depth study of the seed villages at the Asian Development Bank (ADB) and Tata-ICRISAT sites of Vidisha and Guna districts, Madhya Pradesh, India. This provided the project with an insight into the concept and helped identify gaps so that the concept could be refined and implemented in Andhra Pradesh Rural Livelihoods Programme (APRLP) project sites in Andhra Pradesh, India.

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