Home » Food For Thought

Food For Thought

by Vijay Garg
0 comment 2 minutes read

Good nutrition has the power to empower the present and future generations. India’s greatest national treasure is its people — especially women and children — but even after 75 years of independence, a majority of them do not get the required diet to meet their nutritional needs. Malnutrition remains a significant worry. A large proportion of children are still underweight (32%), stunted (36%), ‘wasted’ (19%) and anaemic (67%) according to National Family Health Survey data released this year. The Green Revolution, National Food Security Mission (2007) and coverage of the public distribution system (PDS), mid-day meals (MDM) and Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) have played key roles in augmenting the production of cereals and pulses and enabled the government to provide subsidized foodgrains to a large spectrum of our population and free lunch to more than 100 million school-going children, and also to supplement the diet of pregnant and lactating mothers. Public outreach systems helped support large numbers of the vulnerable. However, the nutrition challenge persists.
Many policy moves are recent initiatives, such as the Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition (POSHAN) Abhiyan and the National Nutrition Mission to address this problem. The need of the hour, though, is a multi-pronged approach focused on short supply chains, sustainable public food procurement and redistribution, a network of partners that support food-processing-driven rural livelihood diversification and diversified diets. To help make affordable food widely available, three partnerships are crucial: with panchayats, the private sector and schools. Private sector involvement could strengthen our food supply infrastructure and aid micro-food processing entrepreneurship in India’s hinterland by deploying resources from schemes like the PMKSY and PMFME. Under their ‘sustainability pledge’, businesses could engage rural FPOs, SHGs and the youth, help develop food infrastructure across agro-climatic zones to provide safe storage, timely processing and marketing of food commodities, control food waste at all stages and follow environment-protective practices. These interventions will not only reduce the carbon footprint of the food industry, but help ensure affordable nutrition choices across income groups through all seasons. An efficient food management system will translate into better transportability, longer shelf life of fresh produce, wider consumer choice and lower prices. A supportive regulatory and policy framework can catalyse all this. Prioritizing the promotion of local agriculture and food value-chain development, suitably re-configuring agriculture for nutrition security and building partnerships that are inclusive of rural stakeholders need high-level attention to improve India’s nutrition statistics. Collective action is imperative to achieve self-reliance in nutrition.

You may also like

Leave a Comment

ABOUT US

Imphal Times is a daily English newspaper published in Imphal and is registered with Registrar of the Newspapers for India with Regd. No MANENG/2013/51092

FOLLOW US ON IG

©2023 – All Right Reserved. Designed and Hosted by eManipur!

Adblock Detected

Please support us by disabling your AdBlocker extension from your browsers for our website.