India, Jan. 22 -- In October 2025, I met Natabar Sarangi, a retired schoolteacher in Niali village in Cuttak district of Odisha. He was over 90 years of age and extremely frail but had big plans about how to promote indigenous varieties of rice. A new building for his museum, Narisho Agricultural Museum and Heritage Centre, was on the anvil where he planned to display the hundreds of rice varieties that he had collected from across the state.

This work comes at a standstill as Sarangi passed away on January 21, 2026, after brief hospitalisation.

Sarangi got involved in promoting landraces in 1992 after he retired and decided to get involved in agriculture as he did not want to sit idle. He began growing hybrid varieties of rice on the 2...