Indian diet

How Can India Become Self-Sufficient in Pulses

Pulses are a staple of the Indian diet and will remain an important source of protein for a vast majority of Indians. Some suggestion on how the government can ensure demand is met.

The National Family Health Survey-5 conducted in 2019-21 revealed that only 16.6% of men and 29.4% of women have never consumed non-vegetarian food (fish, chicken or meat). Despite this, pulses will continue to remain an important source of protein for a vast majority of Indians. This is due both to the availability and affordability of vegetarian diets.

Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) have highlighted that the average Indian diet has excessive consumption of cereals but is deficient in proteins, fruits, and vegetables. Rural India consumes only 194 grams of protein a day, against the recommended 459 grams. Urban Indians consume 242 grams. Richer Indians are consuming too much processed food.

Mission for increasing production of pulses

Successive governments have been quite concerned about the importance of pulses in Indian diets. After the global food crisis of 2005-06, the UPA government launched the National Food Security Mission (NFSM) in May 2007. Its target was to increase the production of pulses by 2 million tonnes by the end of the 11th five-year plan in 2011-12.

NFSM was successful and the production went up from 14.20 million tonnes in 2006-07 to 17.09 million tonnes in 2011-12. However, in 2014-15 and 2015-16, there were two successive droughts and the production of pulses fell by about 2-3 million tonnes as compared to 2013-14. This resulted in high inflation in the initial years of the first Modi government.

Subramanian committee

In 2015, the Union government set up a committee headed by the then chief economic adviser Arvind Subramanian to review the policy interventions required to incentivise the cultivation of pulses.

Several recommendations of the committee have since been implemented by the government. The Modi government has continued with NFSM-Pulses.

The government has also provided a substantial hike in the minimum support price (MSP) of pulses. Between 2013-14 and 2021-22, the MSP of Kharif pulses like tur and urad increased by 46.5% while the same for moong has increased by 61.7%. In the case of Rabi pulses, the MSP of chana has increased in the same period by 68% while the same for lentils (masur) has increased by 86.4%.

The increase in production from 19.26 million tonnes in 2013-14 to 27.81 million tonnes in 2022-23 (2nd advance estimate issued on February 15, 2023) is a result of these interventions.

However, several recommendations of the Subramanian Committee have not been implemented.

Procurement of pulses

The government should procure pulses at MSP. For this, the government should allocate an additional Rs 10,000 crore to procurement agencies. The Modi government enhanced the allocation under Price Support Scheme (PSS) and set up a Price Stabilisation Fund (PSF) for the procurement of pulses. Procurement reached an all-time high of 41.83 lakh tonnes in 2018-19. In 2021-22 it was 12.49 lakh tonnes.

However, for 2023-24, the finance minister has provided only a token allocation of Rs one lakh each for PSS and PSF.

The pulses procured at MSP should be disposed of effectively as their shelf life is shorter than that of wheat and rice. This is a more difficult recommendation and we have seen that Nafed, the main procurement agency builds up a large stock of pulses which have been sold off at prices lower than the economic cost.

The committee recommended that the export of pulses should not be banned. In November 2017, the Government allowed the export of pulses as domestic prices had fallen to levels lower than MSP.

Representative image of tur dal. Photo: ajay_suresh/Flickr CC BY 2.0

The committee further recommended that the state governments should be advised to remove pulses from Agricultural Produce Market Committee (APMC) Acts, so that pulses can be sold and purchased outside the physical boundaries of APMCs. This is already allowed in many states, and the only condition is that the applicable market fee must be paid by the purchaser. In major pulse growing states, the fee is just about 1-2%, so it is not really a disincentive to private processors to purchase pulses outside the APMCs. However, most of the trade still takes place inside APMCs only as the physical infrastructure needed for a large volume of trade is not easy to replicate.

The government should set up a new institution for pulses which would be owned by the government, private players, and the public sector. But it should be managed by an independent board of directors. It should be allowed to engage in purchase storage and trading for other crops also, including fruits and vegetables. However, this recommendation has not been accepted as Nafed is already in the market and it has long experience in the procurement and sale of pulses. In 2015-16, the Price Stabilization Fund was set up to enable the government to purchase pulses even at a price higher than the MSP, if the Government felt that the open market prices are likely to increase in the off-season.

In the medium-term pulses production must be incentivised in the irrigated areas of Punjab. There has not been any progress on this as the procurement of pulses is not assured while almost the entire surplus of non-basmati paddy is procured.

For increasing the yield of pulses, the technology of genetic modification should not be shunned. The yield of pulses is lower than in other countries. For example, the yield of tur in India is only 859 kg/ha (2021-22) whereas the same in Myanmar is nearly double that. The Government is still ambivalent about the use of GM technology.

MOUs for duty-free import of pulses

In addition to the steps taken to incentivise domestic production of pulses, the government also signed agreements for duty-free import of pulses from Mozambique, Malawi and Myanmar.

In May 2021, pulses were placed under the Open General License (OGL) category. In July 2021, Essential Commodities Act was invoked which enabled the state governments to impose stock limits on traders on tur, masur and urad.

Steps to augment production

Varietal and seed replacement are the major focus areas of government for increasing the production of pulses. For tur, masur and urad, seeds of high-yielding varieties, which are available either with the central seed agencies or in the states are distributed free. The government hopes that intercropping can effectively increase the production of pulses. The government is targeting rice fallow areas in Assam, Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Odisha, West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka and Tamil Nadu.

Despite these efforts, the production of Kharif pulses has stagnated and India is still import dependent. In 2021-22, about 27 lakh tonnes of pulses were imported. This had 8.4 lakh tonnes of tur, 6.1 lakh tonnes of urad and 6.7 lakh tonnes of lentils.

The largest crop of pulses is chana (rabi) which contributes about half of India’s production of pulses. Chana prices have remained below MSP for the last two years and yet future trading has remained suspended since August 2022 and the same has now been extended till December 2023. In the absence of an option to hedge, the farmers have no clue about the prices they should expect. India is producing more chana than required. Diversion of area to mustard may help the farmers realise better prices.

Taking a cue from this, the sown area under chana (around 11.2 million hectares) in the current rabi crop is 1.8 per cent less than last year. If the prices continue to be lower than the MSP, the Nafed may again have to procure a large quantity of chana. In 2022-23, Nafed procured about 26 lakh tonnes of chana which will be given to state governments at a subsidy of Rs 15 per kg for distribution under PDS or welfare scheme.

Going forward

The NITI Aayog has projected that the demand for pulses will increase to 32.64 million tonnes in 2029-30. The three-year action agenda of NITI Aayog (2017) mentioned that a technological breakthrough in pulses and oilseeds is the need of the hour.

For increasing the production by about 5 million tonnes over the next seven years, diversion of area from rice may be necessary. If this expansion of area has to come in irrigated areas, a concerted policy is required to ensure remunerative price signals for pulses.

Siraj Hussain is a former union agriculture secretary. This article is adapted from a speech he delivered at the Pulses Conclave of IPGA.

Gut Instinct: How Diets Shape the Unique Composition of Indian Guts

Researchers from IISER Bhopal decided to carry out an in-depth study of the diversity of Indian gut flora by comparing and contrasting the microbiome of populations from two parts of the country with very disparate diets.

In a recent study, researchers show that Indian guts harbour a unique microbial population compared to other countries, and that the diverse diets within the country are associated with different gut microbes.

“Diet has been known to be the key driver in shaping the gut microbiome. Indian population has diverse lifestyles and food habits and so far, the Indian gut genome is not well explored,” states Vineet Sharma, a scientist at Indian Institute of Science, Education and Research (IISER) Bhopal and a member of the research team who performed the study. India also has the highest prevalence of diabetes in the world, with 53% of deaths in India attributed to diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. India thus presents an interesting case study to understand the interplay between gut, diet and health.

In this first-ever large-scale study, Sharma and colleagues analysed the microorganisms in gut of 110 healthy individuals to uncover the microbial diversity in India. The researchers sampled individuals from two locations with distinct diets: Bhopal in the North-Central region and Kerala from the southern part of India. The Bhopal population predominantly consumes a carbohydrate-rich diet, including plant-derived products, wheat and trans-fat food (high-fat dairy, sweets and fried snacks), whereas, the Kerala population commonly consumes an omnivorous diet comprising rice, meat, and fish.

Researchers collected faecal samples from the volunteers, froze it within 30 min of collecting, and used it to sequence the microbiome (the combined genetic material of all the microorganisms present in a sample). A common method used for such purpose is the sequencing of the 16S rRNA gene. This gene consists of a region that is variable in different microorganisms, allowing the classification of different microbes. Using this analysis, the researchers found a total of 943,395 genes that were unique to the Indian microbiome.

Also read: Depressed People Have Low Levels of Two Bacteria in Their Guts: Study

The microbiome of the Indian population was also compared to the microbiome of other countries, such as USA, China, and Denmark. “One of the most interesting results was the much higher levels of Prevotella species in Indian gut microbiome compared to the other populations,” says Sharma. Prevotella has been previously observed in communities that consume a plant-rich diet and is associated with vegetarianism.

The differences in the microbial population within the country were also studied. The microbiome of participants from Bhopal was enriched in species from genus Prevotella, while the same from Kerala was enriched in species of Bifidobacterium, Ruminococcus, Clostridium and Faecalibacterium.

The authors propose these differences could arise due to the differences in the diet of the two locations. Using a method that annotates functions to genes, they showed that the Bhopal microbiome was enriched in genes involved in breaking down plant polysaccharides, while Kerala microbiome had genes involved in degrading lipids and proteins, indicating its animal-based diet.

Metabolites are small molecules produced during metabolism and can reveal insights on lifestyle and metabolic changes. An analysis of metabolites in the faeces showed a high concentration of saturated fatty acids and branched chain fatty acids in Bhopal microbiome, while the Kerala microbiome had short chain and medium chain fatty acids, presumably due to the high consumption of coconut oil in Kerala.

“Both branched-chain fatty acids (BCFA) and short-chain fatty acids (SCFAs) play an important role in the maintenance of health and elevated concentration of BCFAs may trigger the progression of different diseases,” says Bhabhatosh Das, a scientist at the Translational Health Science And Technology Institute (THSTI) who was not associated with the study.

It is known that the north-Indian population is predisposed towards diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. Further studies like these on diabetic and obese individuals can provide more insights into such predispositions towards diseases.

This article has been republished from IndiaBioscience. Read the original article.

First Global Scientific Eating Plan Forgets the World’s Poor

The authors do not explain how the world’s less well-off – who tend to subsist on poor quality starches – could follow their recommendations.

A team of 37 world-leading scientists from 16 countries have just released the world’s first ever scientific eating plan. The “planetary health diet” is designed to be healthier for people and more environmentally friendly.

The team warns that the way we eat now threatens both our health and the long-term survival of the planet. They say the current food system dangerously overproduces greenhouse gases, misuses fertiliser, and causes large-scale food wastage and massive land degradation.

Their solution is to shift to a diet that transforms this damaging food system. This diet would sustainably feed up to 10 billion people by 2050 and avert about 11 million premature adult deaths a year due to cardiovascular disease and other non-communicable diseases.

The diet sounds like a silver bullet, but we have found it to be slightly problematic. It doesn’t recognise the enormous differences across the world when it comes to food consumption and production systems.

It suggests we need less livestock in the world because they damage the environment and produce health-threatening foods – like meat. To most people in developed countries, livestock are the source of neatly packaged foods, readily available in the supermarket. To one billion people in developing countries, livestock are much, much more. They are a source of much-needed livelihoods, incomes, jobs, savings, and nutrition. In some environments, fruits and vegetables may be difficult to grow, and food security depends strongly on animal-source produce.

India’s Cancer Incidence Rate Among Lowest in the World – but for How Long?

A recent article in the Indian edition of a newspaper showed how often the methods behind cancer data collection and interpretation are misunderstood, giving rise to flawed arguments about what we need to do next.

India has some of the highest numbers of cancer cases in the world but has some of the lowest rates of cancer in the world. For anyone, there can be hardly be a more contradictory statement. However, this statement is as much true as it is completely non-contradictory.

For most, it is confusion, and one of the outcrops of that confusion recently appeared as an oped in the Business Insider (BI), which cited an Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) report, in turn based on a paper recently published in the journal JAMA Oncology.

The Global Burden of Disease (GBD) project is an initiative by the IHME, which provides impartial global-level (and now state- or province-wise for many countries, including India) health trends to inform policymakers, researchers and funders. The paper in JAMA Oncology, like the report discussing the findings, was authored by researchers from the IHME.

Among other things, this report stated that India was in the list of countries with the lowest incidence rate of cancer development (lowest rates of development of new cases of cancer per 100,000 or 1 lakh population), albeit at the bottom. India’s rate (106.6 per 1 lakh population) was much lower than that of countries like Australia (743.8), New Zealand (542.8) and the US (532.9), which were in the list of countries with the highest incidence rate of cancer.

Developed countries fare worse

As one of the cancer experts from India and a co-author of the journal article in JAMA Oncology, I have observed a number of opinions and comments on this work appear in Indian media. One such piece was the oped in BI, which argued on a flawed basis that the incidence of cancer in India could not be one of the lowest in the world. The principal thrust was that there were a lot of missed cases of cancer in India due to which the incidence rates reported for India were fallaciously low. To make this case, the BI piece had quotes from two oncologists and cited two reports, by Ernst and Young report and The Lancet. While what the oncologists and the two reports had stated were mostly true, they were used to build a wrong argument.

The BI piece’s first question was: “For a country with such a large population, how are India’s rates of cancer so low?” The first thing to know about incidence rates is that they are the number of new cases per unit of population (mostly per 100,000 people) per year. Therefore, rates are adjusted for population and can be compared across countries with different population numbers. So, because of its large population, the number of cancer cases in India is also high. But when we create a rate, the number becomes small because the denominator is large. And when it comes to rates: the incidence rate of cancer in India is much lower than in developed countries.

The BI report then went on to claim that “it was an issue of data reporting”. For this, it quoted two oncologists who talked about missed cancer cases and how India had the third highest rate (it doesn’t) of female cancer cases in the world, after China and the US. It is true that in developing countries around the world, including India, cancer cases don’t always manage to reach a doctor since they are in remote parts of the country or the people don’t have the resources to avail medical facilities.

However, using this information to argue that India’s cancer incidence rates might be much higher is not appropriate. It shows a lack of understanding of how cancer registries work and how the GBD method for cancer works. Further, while it is true that the number of breast cancer cases and deaths in India are among the highest in the world, along with China and the US (Figure 1), the death rates of breast cancer in India are much lower than in developed countries (Figure 2).

Number of deaths due to breast cancer in the world. Credit: GBD Compare

The numbers of deaths are highest in China, India and the US, which light up in the yellow-red part of the spectrum.

Death rate per 100,000 due to breast cancer in the world. Credit: GBD Compare

When it comes to death rates, we clearly see that the developed countries in Europe, Australia and North America light up in the red-yellow part of the spectrum because their rates of incidence are higher than India’s and China’s, which are in the blue part of the spectrum.

Role of cancer registries

Then, the BI piece refers to an Ernst and Young report, which discusses the dismal state of India’s cancer detection system, with very few mammograms and PET-CT scans. While this is true and an important reason for why our cancer case detection rates are so low, it is still not the reason for the lower incidence rates of cancer in India. The piece talks about a Lancet study which had found that 70% of those with cancer in India die early because of a lack of awareness, lack of early detection and lack of access to proper medical care. While the number of deaths due to this is high, the death rates are still low in India (as shown in the figures above), something which hasn’t been cleared by the piece’s author.

According to the Ernst and Young report, India’s incidence rate is around 94 per 100,000; the author speculates that it must be higher: around 150-200 cases per 100,000 due to deficiencies in data collection and screening.

Overall, the BI oped stands for how often the methods behind cancer data collection and interpretation are misunderstood.

While we know that the number of cases may be high, due to high population the rates can be lower. Our estimate for the incidence rates come from cancer registries that cover population in a specific area and precisely capture every cancer case that occurs in that particular group. These registries make sure that the number of missed cases is as low as possible (less than 1%) so that the incidence rates as a result are accurate.

For our study, the authors accessed data from around 40 population-based cancer registries from India and combined them with with the GBD cancer methods to create an accurate cancer incidence rate estimate for India. The GBD cancer methods are published openly and are peer-reviewed by experts. Our findings themselves were published only after a global consensus on the methods and the findings were reached. Thus, the cancer incidence rates for India, which arise from cancer registries and the GBD cancer methods, are highly accurate, without much bias and unaffected by missed or under-reporting of cancer cases.

Two kinds of transitions

But what could be behind the low incidence rates of cancer in India? There are two main population changes happening in countries around the world, and they generally go hand in hand. They are demographic transition and epidemiological transition. With economic development, countries reduce their birth and death rates and the population pyramid becomes rectangular – i.e. the number of old people increases while the number of children and young decreases. Also, with economic development, infectious diseases are slowly being replaced by chronic diseases. The effects of these two transitions is reflected on the cancer rates as well.

Further, the main risk factor for cancer is ageing: the longer one lives, the higher is their chance of developing cancer. In developed countries like Australia, New Zealand and the US, life expectancy is high and people live longer, due to which they have a higher risk of developing cancer. This shows up in the high incidence rates of cancer. In India, which is still a developing country, people don’t live long enough to increase their cancer risk substantially. Thus, at a population level, the incidence rates of chronic diseases such as cancer are much lower in India than in the developed world.

Cancer risks other than ageing have also been lower in India; there is also some evidence of certain Indian diets being able to protect against cancer. However, this will not be the case for much longer. India is developing quite fast economically, and with that the Indian population will inevitably undergo rapid demographic and epidemiological transitions together with an increased exposure to risk factors for cancer.

One of the findings of the JAMA Oncology article was the rapidly increasing number of new cancer cases in developing countries – with a 31.9% increase (16.6% due to population growth and 15.3% due to population ageing) in new cancer cases in low-middle SDI countries (which includes India) between 2006-2016. While it might be difficult to reduce the pace of rising cancer cases and rates, we need to do something to catch it early so that people live longer, and so cancer becomes a chronic disease rather than a death sentence.

Subhojit Dey is Executive Director at Disha Foundation.