Millets The Orphan Crop for Uncertain Future (HB)

India has the largest number of malnourished children in the world and one third of all the stunted children globally. The low levels of under nutrition, coupled with increasing levels of over nutrition, causing double burden of malnutrition. Given the high rates of economic growth witnessed, the malnutrition levels are a cause of serious concern. To leave no one behind, we must tackle this grave situation with integrated and holistic approach in order to achieve the global nutritional targets and catalysing other developmental goals.

This book entitled “Millets: The Orphan Crop for Uncertain Future” is intended to provide the readers especially students with a comprehensive knowledge of the various nutritional aspects of millets with special focus on the God’s Grain – the Pearl millet. While going through this book, the learners will get an insight of nutritional composition of various millets and importance of millets in present scenario of COVID-19 and global climate change. The problems associated with the production and processing of millets has also been discussed diligently along with the probable solutions. This book has three sections with total 17 chapters on wide areas related to millet nutrition and benefits of having millets in our diet on health.

The first chapter has been dedicated to the millets and its importance on nutrition and human health. The second chapter highlights the status of malnourishment and how to achieve the nutritional security in present context of burgeoning population. The third chapter provides the basic information about the millet status in India and possible means and ways to popularize this God’ Grain. The fourth chapter compares the millet production and productivity in post green revolution era under the domination of cereals and impact on millet processing and utilization. Fifth chapter sensitize the young mind about the nutritional needs of different strata of people and recommended dietary allowances. The sixth chapter has been written to highlight the importance of nutrient in human health with a recommendation to have a food as medicine or otherwise one has to take medicine as food. The seventh chapter deals with one of the important millets – Ragi enriched in calcium and one of the mightier grains for healthy tomorrow.

The section II consists of chapters from eight to twelve and basically deals with the basic concept of nutrition and health in context of millets as miracle grains and highlights its importance on various nutritional parameters as key to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals by 2030.  

We have dedicated our third section to one of the most important millets – pearl millet, also called as god’s grain. It consists of chapters from thirteenth to seventeenth and basically deals with the basic nutritional information about the pearl millet, its processed products, the journey of pearl millet hybrid development in India, about the Lipase enzyme and its role in rancidity, the story of development of Rancidity Matrix having wide implications in pearl millet breeding program, etc.

Omics tools have been widely used in agriculturally important crops to identify the novel/ putative genes/ proteins and to characterize various nutrition linked pathways. Unfortunately, it has not much been used in the orphan crops like millets. We have genuinely tried to discuss the importance of omics based research in pearl millets in our seventeenth chapter, and address the very pertinent question - how PearlOmics will help in face-lifting the crops in the arena of world Agriculture.