Rice · Rice · Short entry
Kalanamak
काला नमक
A traditional black-husked aromatic rice of eastern Uttar Pradesh, protected by an Indian Geographical Indication for Siddharthnagar and ten neighbouring districts; its milled grain is whitish, medium and slender.
The Buddha's rice
Local tradition, repeated by IRRI and the district administration, holds that Kalanamak has been grown around Siddharthnagar since the Buddha's time and calls it Buddha ka Mahaprasad. Its husk is black and does not turn straw-coloured at maturity, so farmers judge ripeness by the leaves.
It once covered more than a tenth of the district's rice area but fell below 0.5 % by 2002; under the One District One Product scheme the district's Kalanamak area grew from 2,715 ha in 2018 to about 18,000 ha in 2024. In a study of 48 advanced Kalanamak breeding lines, most had intermediate amylose. Dimensions here are estimated from the medium-slender class.