Smallholder women and men farmers in India use diverse social networks to access seeds of their choice and related information. Women largely depend on informal seed systems, also referred to as farmer-managed or community seed systems. However, with changing agrarian relations, the informal seed systems are facing challenges in ensuring equitable access to traditional and community-preferred landraces or varieties through informal social networks, connections and exchange. At the field level, these changes adversely impact women and marginal farmers’ access to preferred crops and varieties/landraces, household gender relations, food and nutrition security, dietary diversity, food system resilience and livelihoods. To fill this gap in the informal seed systems, the Community Seed Banks (CSBs) model has been promoted as a strategy to strengthen and ensure access to traditional varieties of different crops, specifically neglected and under-utilized crop species and build seed-saving capacity at the local level (Vernooy et al. 2014 and 2022).
Given this backdrop, CSBs have evolved as informal institutions, governed and managed by local communities (collective action-based institutions) with the principal goal of conserving and promoting the cultivation of locally adapted varieties/landraces of several crop species and preserving agrobiodiversity. This has been promoted as a socially innovative strategy, integrating traditional practices in its operation to ensure equitable access to seeds for all when seeds are not available in the formal seed systems or the market.
In India, CSBs are known under a variety of names: Village Seed Banks, Seed Savers Network, Seed Saviours Group, Community Gene Bank etc. They conserve and promote cultivation of traditional landraces/locally adapted varieties of main food crops in the region (cereals, millets, pulses, oil seeds and vegetables), storing and managing varying quantities of locally grown seed material(s), ranging from a few kilograms per accession to a few hundred kilograms. CSBs have been in existence for about two and a half decades in India, largely promoted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs), research institutions and more recently by a few government entities. The main functions of CSBs include a collection of locally cultivated traditional varieties/landraces, reviving and strengthening their cultivation, promoting local consumption and strengthening local seed systems. In the recent past, the concept has been extended to promote the cultivation of notified varieties that are suitable to the local agroecosystems to improve the seed or varietal replacement rates (Reddy et al. 2006). Although women farmers are the key stakeholders in CSBs, in the process of their growth, coupled with changing varietal preferences and production systems, there have been changes in the gender and social facets. Despite notable contributions made by women to e CSBs in the informal seed systems, prevailing social gender norms reinforce inequalities and affect women’s access to seeds and their effective participation in production (Puskur et al. 2021) and processing and value addition spheres.To map and understand changes in gender and social inclusion dimensions concerning CSBs in India, a research study was undertaken jointly by the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) and the M S Swaminathan Research Foundation (MSSRF) during the period 2022-23 as part of the CGIAR Seed Equal Initiative. This study investigated the CSB's goal and strategies, operational processes, governance, communication strategies, relevance to policies and its impact from the gender perspectives. The study carried out a comprehensive literature review and also collected primary data to map active CSBs functioning across India. Based on this, the study mapped 144 CSBs in India and they are dealing on traditional paddy and millet varieties, pulses, oilseeds, and vegetables. Within this, ten CSBs were chosen for in-depth study based on the vulnerability of the associated agroecosystems, geographic diversity and operational structures (Table 1).