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Pregnant women to get zinc rice
A ‘High Zinc Rice Variety’ (HZRV) is all set to be supplied to the people through the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS).
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Hyderabad: A ‘High Zinc Rice Variety’ (HZRV) is all set to be supplied to the people through the Targeted Public Distribution System (TPDS). It was developed after an eleven years of research by the Indian Institute of Rice Research (IIRR). This entirely new variety of HZRV is capable of countering the congenital malformations among the pregnant women. And, in turn it is expected to contribute to reduce the childhood mortality.
According to Dr V Ravindra Babu, Project Director of IIRR, the bio-fortification programme to come up with this new variety had started in 2004. “Our aim was even after polishing the rice, if we could retain the iron and zinc then it would useful for the consumers. It was with this objective that the eleven year so research has been carried out,” he added.
Generally, during the process of polishing of rice we are losing about 40 per cent of the zinc in it. But, the research labour has yielded in the scientist able to retain a high zinc ratio in rice even after polishing. “It has retained and got the substance and quantity that was more than 20 parts per million (ppm). However, the international standards set that the bio-availability of zinc in rice should be around 24 ppm.
But, we consider the above 20ppm of zinc retention is good enough,” he said. Further, high zinc rice would also help not only to improve growth in children aged less than five years, but they would also develop a good resistance capability to diarrhoea, he said.
Explaining the process that had gone behind the development of the new variety, Ravindra Babu said that they have developed it thorough a conventional breeding method. Clarifying further, he pointed out, “In India, there are different land races (parcels) available, where we have the iron and zinc. But, the problem was that they are not the high yielders.
So, what we did was that we had taken the low yielding varieties and used them as donors and, in turn, introduced into the high yielding verities,” he added. However, we are yet to cross another milestone that is we were planning a study on using the new variety of high zinc rice as part of the menu for children in association with National Institute of Nutrition (NIN), he said.
By V Naveen Kumar
