A three-day millets food festival, Millet Fest-2012, was inaugurated by Agriculture Minister K. Lakshminarayana at the People's Plaza here on Saturday to create awareness among people on the forgotten foodgrains.
The festival includes exhibition of millet crops, processing machinery, products of millets such as flour, pasta, vermicelli, suji, ready-to-eat snacks, recipe contest, health check-up and diet counselling. A few restaurants and caterers have also set up their stalls there to offer dinner with millet food recipes in the night.
Health benefits
The event open for public from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. till March 26 seeks to create awareness about nutritional and health benefits of millets, to showcase drudgery-free process and product-making technologies, to popularise millet-based breakfast, main meal and snack recipes for inclusion in daily menu and to increase the area of millet cultivation by creating demand for millet products.
The Minister accompanied by Principal Secretary of Agriculture V. Nagi Reddy and Commissioner of Agriculture V. Usha Rani went round the stalls set up by different wings of Acharya NG Ranga Agricultural University (ANGRAU), central institutions, non-governmental organisations and entrepreneurs.
Mr. Lakshminarayana said said the Centre had introduced an Initiative for National Security through Intensive Millets Promotion (INSIMP) to encourage cultivation of millets for improving nutritional value of regular diet and allocated Rs. 11.32 crore to the State during 2011-12 for the purpose, he stated.
Under the initiative, crops such as jowar (sorghum), ragi, bajra (pearl millet), korra (foxtail millet), sama (little millet) and others were cultivated in 54 clusters in 11 districts, he explained.
