Fortify India’s Nutrition With Rice

Context:  The unavailability of a diverse, well-balanced diet leads to malnutrition, which has severe implications on human health and can cause lifelong conditions.

• Large Population: 136 crore people to be fed.
• Biased dietary system that is predominantly carbohydrate-dense. Ensuring the availability of naturally diverse food on each individual’s plate is a massive task.
• Lacks necessary infrastructure: For proper storage and transportation of perishable foods.
• Dietary diversity a not-so-feasible option: Lack of purchasing power along with awareness and incorrect eating practices makes the task a burden.

Significance of food fortification/biofortification to address malnutrition

• The most efficient and cost-effective nutrition intervention method: In developed economies like Europe, Canada and US, food fortification programmes have successfully eliminated micronutrient malnutrition diseases such as goitre, rickets and cretinism, responsible for high levels of childhood morbidity and mortality.
• Feasibility: About 70% of India’s population consumes rice as a staple food. India is the second-largest producer of rice. 
• During processing, mills yield about10-12% of the total rice as broken rice as a by-product. 
• The rice fortification process utilises these broken rice kernels as carriers for the required essential micronutrients to reach huge masses, especially the lower-income population without dietary and behavioural alterations.
• The broken rice kernels are ground into flour, mixed with a vitamin-mineral premix, and extruded to produce rice-shaped kernels, or fortified rice kernels (FRKs).
• Economic opportunity: As blending can happen at smaller mills, offering an opportunity to produce and make available value-added products like fortified rice not only in safety net programmes but in the open market as well.

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