Why biofortified crops could shape the next phase of Indian agriculture
A recent report argued that biofortified crops should become a central plank of India's next phase of agricultural development, shifting the sector's goal from producing enough calories to producing adequate nutrition.
The report points to biofortification as a scalable, breeding-based route to addressing widespread micronutrient deficiencies (notably iron and zinc) without requiring changes in dietary habits.
It notes that biofortified varieties of staple crops (wheat, pearl millet, rice, lentil) have already been bred and released to farmers in India, with adoption growing across several states.
The report frames commercialisation and market linkages — not just crop development — as the next bottleneck for scaling biofortification's nutritional impact.
Biofortification
Biofortification is the process of breeding staple food crops to increase their micronutrient content (primarily iron, zinc, and provitamin A), using conventional plant breeding or biotechnology, so that nutrition improves through the food people already eat rather than through fortification (adding nutrients during processing) or supplementation. It differs from genetic modification (GM) fortification (e.g., Golden Rice, engineered for beta-carotene) in that most Indian biofortified varieties — pearl millet, wheat, rice — are conventionally bred, not transgenic.
Key Details
- ICAR set minimum breeding standards in 2017–18: national pearl millet varieties must contain at least 42 ppm iron and 32 ppm zinc.
- HarvestPlus (a CGIAR-linked program) has worked with ICAR, State Agricultural Universities, ICRISAT and CIMMYT for over a decade to develop and disseminate biofortified varieties in India.
- Released varieties include iron-biofortified pearl millet (e.g., Dhanashakti) and zinc-biofortified wheat; per HarvestPlus, 10 iron pearl millet and 9 zinc wheat varieties have been released and adopted by Indian farmers to date.
- Separately, in 2023 the Prime Minister unveiled 109 high-yielding, climate-resilient and biofortified crop varieties (across 61 crops) at the Indian Agricultural Research Institute (IARI), New Delhi — a mix of climate-resilient and biofortified releases, not all biofortified alone.
The report's push for biofortification as agriculture's "next phase" tracks directly onto this national breeding programme — the static syllabus concept it is designed to test is the definition and breeding methodology of biofortification, and how it differs from GM approaches like Golden Rice.
Institutional and Policy Linkages
Biofortified variety promotion in India runs through ICAR's national research system and is embedded within food-security programmes. The National Food Security Mission (NFSM), which began in 2007 to raise production of rice, wheat, pulses and coarse cereals, has incorporated biofortified variety promotion as part of its later phases to link productivity gains with nutritional outcomes.
Key Details
- Bihar and Odisha have made state-level commitments to scale zinc-biofortified wheat and rice cultivation and consumption to address stunting.
- Biofortified crop area in India crossed roughly 5.5 million hectares in a recent estimate, led by wheat, followed by pearl millet, mustard, rice and lentil.
This shows biofortification moving from a research-stage innovation to a policy-embedded, state-scaled intervention — the kind of institutional detail UPSC tests alongside the core science.
- ICAR's 2017 minimum breeding standard for pearl millet: iron ≥ 42 ppm, zinc ≥ 32 ppm.
- HarvestPlus has partnered with India's agricultural research system for close to a decade on biofortification; 10 iron pearl millet and 9 zinc wheat varieties have been released so far.
- In 2023, 109 climate-resilient and biofortified varieties across 61 crops were unveiled at IARI, New Delhi.
- Biofortified crop coverage in India was estimated at over 5.5 million hectares in a recent assessment, with wheat as the largest share.
- Biofortification is distinct from conventional fortification (post-harvest nutrient addition) and from GM-based nutrient engineering (e.g., Golden Rice).