‘Need of the hour is to improve our culinary diversity’

M.S. Swaminathan suggests inclusion of millets in the diet

August 08, 2017 12:44 am | Updated 12:44 am IST - CHENNAI

CHENNAI, TAMIL NADU, 28/01/2017, FOR INDEX, M.S. Swaminathan,Founder, MSSRF delivering a lecture on `Rev. Dr.Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture 2017 at D.G. Vaishnav College, Arumbakkam in Chennai on Saturday. Photo: M. Vedhan.

CHENNAI, TAMIL NADU, 28/01/2017, FOR INDEX, M.S. Swaminathan,Founder, MSSRF delivering a lecture on `Rev. Dr.Martin Luther King Memorial Lecture 2017 at D.G. Vaishnav College, Arumbakkam in Chennai on Saturday. Photo: M. Vedhan.

India is currently in a dilemma, as it has mountains of grains thanks to surplus food production yet ranks poorly in the Global Hunger Index, at 97 out of 118 countries as measured in 2016.

Addressing the issue, M.S. Swaminathan, plant geneticist, who is acknowledged as the Father of India’s Green Revolution, underscored the importance of adopting a nutrition-centric approach to agriculture in India, where it was not enough to just produce enough food grains but also address the nutritional quality of the grain produced.

At the Founding Day celebration of M.S. Swaminathan Research Foundation, which was set up on August 7, 1988, various experts from the field of agriculture and food security on Monday highlighted the need to eradicate hunger in India.

Recommending that India expand its food basket to include nutri-millets, Dr. Swaminathan said doing so would help people overcome nutritional deficiencies due to the dominance of rice and wheat on Indian plates.

“The need of the hour is to improve our culinary diversity to include millets and other highly nutritious food in our diet,” he said, adding that under-nutrition in India could be addressed by implementing the provisions of the Right to Food law (National Food Security Act, 2013). “The government should also include pulses in the PDS system, as has been done in Chhattisgarh.”

Krishna Byregowda, Karnataka’s Agriculture Minister, spoke about the interventions made in the State to include nutri-millets in the food basket. “We have procured millets for the State PDS system in Karnataka and are also paying a higher price to farmers supplying them,” he said, adding that agricultural scientists should focus on improving the yields of nutritional crops and make them remunerative for farmers to encourage them to grow these.

Climate resilient

Given the challenge of climate change affecting agricultural prospects, Mr. Byregowda said nutritional millets could help resolve the hunger challenge and prove to be climate resilient as well. “In Karnataka, we have seen a rainfall deficit of 50% and more and droughts in the past three years. Therefore, food crops that have been responsible for creating this ecological imbalance should be replaced with crops such as millets that require less water to grow,” he said. He also criticised scientists for calling millets as “coarse cereals” as it conveyed a dismissive attitude towards these food crops, though that may not have been the intention.

The conference is on until August 9.

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