It is the wild ancestor of the cultivated cereal crop Echinochloa frumentacea, sawa millet.

[2] Some taxonomists treat the two taxa as one species, in which case the domesticated forms may also be referred to as E. colonum.

The grass occurs throughout tropical Asia and Africa in fields, and along roadsides and waterways.

[1] In India seeds of this grass are used to prepare a food dish called khichadi[4] and are consumed during festival fasting days.

The 1889 book 'The Useful Native Plants of Australia’ records that Panicum Colonum, (an earlier name for this plant) had common names which included "Shama Millet" of India; called also, in parts of India, "Wild Rice" or "Jungle Rice" and that it "Has erect stems from two to eight feet high, and very succulent.