Bio-fortification of foods offers a possible solution to eradicate hidden hunger in India. Elaborate (200 Words)
Refer - The Indian Express
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K. V. A 6 years
Pls review
IAS Parliament 6 years
Good answer. Keep Writing.
IAS Parliament 6 years
KEY POINTS
· Despite major government interventions — including providing highly subsidised foodgrains to the poorest 67 per cent of the population under the National Food Security Act (NFSA), a free Mid-day Meal Scheme (MDM) that targets around 100 million students in government schools and a supplementary nutrition programme through the ICDS network — the country is home to the largest number of malnourished children in the world.
· Poverty, gender disparity, poor sanitation, low health and nutrition service coverage and poor nutritional intake — particularly an iron-deficient diet — continue to impede our fight against anaemia.
· Food fortification is a largely-ignored, yet critical, strategy which has proved an effective, affordable, scalable and sustainable intervention in many countries. India too has tested this idea when it successfully tackled the widespread problem of goitre by mandating iodised salt in 1962.
· As there are numerous programmes to address malnutriton, this simple idea of fortifiying meals has the potential to reach every segment of the population.
· Rice is the staple for 65 per cent of the Indian population, most of whom are located in high malnutrition burden states. Supply of fortified rice through a network of fair price shops is a cost-effective intervention to address anaemia across all sections of the population
· Evaluations in Odisha’s Gajapati district, which experimented with fortified rice in MDM, found that the incidence of anaemia has reduced by 20 per cent between 2012 and 2015, of which 6 per cent reduction can be directly attributable to fortification.
· The Department of Food and Public Distribution, facilitated by the NITI Aayog, has recently launched a centrally-sponsored scheme on rice fortification in PDS.
· A successful pan-India scale up of fortification will depend on many factors — the political will of state governments, flexibility to allow states to adapt the fortification model to their procurement and distribution systems and capacity building of different stakeholders.
· The FSSAI’s role, its enforcement machinery and the quality control labs needs to be strengthened.
N.k 6 years
Review
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IAS Parliament 6 years
Good answer. Try to have good flow in the answer( coherence between points). Keep Writing.
