Vilas Tonapi is currently serving as Director, Indian Council of Agricultural Research (ICAR)-Indian Institute of Millets Research.

He is leading the All India Co-ordinated Research program on Sorghum and Small Millets. His primary focus has always been to plan, develop and manage the crop improvement programs and strategies in sorghum and millets for food and nutritional security and livelihood of dry and irrigated ecosystems. Through his dedicated efforts, the Government of India named the year 2018-19 as the “National Year of Millets”. Moreover, the Government renamed “Millets” as “Nutri-cereals” which was an important milestone towards the nutritional security of India.

Dr Tonapi has strengthened self-sustainable community seed systems which improved the profitability in drylands. The economic gains thus augmented by addressing envisaged benchmarks have resulted in significant improvement in productivity, profitability and even export earnings from sorghum and millets.

He is instrumental in establishing the “Technology Business Incubator” also called as “Nutrihub” sponsored by the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India. Dr Tonapi has contributed as many as 60 peer-reviewed research papers and authored 26 books. He has also published several policy papers and organised nearly 99 training programs to promote sorghum and millet technologies.

Dr Tonapi has also facilitated singing a record number of 77 MoU’s for technology transfer and entrepreneurship development. Under his leadership, the institute bagged the prestigious ICAR’s “Sardar Patel Outstanding ICAR Institution Award 2018” and the “Chaudhary Devi Lal Outstanding All India Coordinated Research Project Award 2019“ for the coordinated research program.

Dr Tonapi has been honoured with numerous awards throughout his career for his exceptional work including Kirloskar Vasundhara Mitra Award that he received recently in 2021.