Adding Value to Your Food

Context: Recently, Prime Minister had released a bunch of 17 biofortified varieties of eight food crops for commercial cultivation.

Need for biofortification in India:

• Cost-effective way to tackle malnutrition: Malnutrition (imbalanced nutrition) and undernourishment (inadequate nutrition), more aptly called hidden hunger.

• India is lowly-placed at 94 among 107 countries, below Bangladesh, Pakistan, and Nepal, on the Global Hunger Index 2020; About 38.4% of children are stunted and 35.7% underweight.
• India has the world’s largest number of undernourished people at 194.6 million.

• Reason for Hidden Hunger:

•  Food supplementation schemes are mostly cereals-based and disregard the need for a balanced and wholesome diet
• The normal diet of poor households is dominated by cereals.

• A late start for India: Nearly 40 low- and middle-income countries in Africa and elsewhere are way ahead of India in this respect.

• Biofortified grains can produce nutrients on their own: which is better than blending or coating cereals with vitamins and mineral as it improves morbidity, work performance and cognitive functioning.

Biofortification in India: India has developed nearly 36 biofortified varieties of different crops, and more are in the pipeline.

• CR Dhan 315: A rice variety with a high amount of zinc.

• HD 3298, HD 303 and DDW 48: Varieties of wheat supplemented with protein and iron.

• Maize hybrids have a superior quality protein like lysine and tryptophan.

• Finger millets (ragi) (CMFV 1 and 2): have additional minerals like calcium, iron and zinc.

• Pusa Mustard: has been modified to reduce its content of harmful erucic acid.

• Yams: The varieties Sri Neelima and DA 340 have been enriched with zinc, iron, and anthocyanin, which is believed to guard against diabetes, cancer, inflammation, and obesity.

• Groundnut varieties — Girnar 4 and 5: have been gene-edited to augment their Oleic acid content. 

Conclusion: Increased use of biofortified foods and supplementing it with food-based welfare programmes will result in nutrition improvement