ICAR-CIWA celebrated World Food Day on 16th October, 2021. The theme of the programme is “Safe Food now for a Healthy Tomorrow”. In the introductory remarks, Dr. Anil Kumar, Director, ICAR-CIWA briefed about the history and importance of celebrating World Food Day and the major objectives of celebrating this day. He threw light upon the challenges faced by our Nation regarding malnutrition among women and children. He also stressed that our technologies should reach out to the farm women for their nutritional empowerment.

Dr. O. N. Singh, Vice-Chancellor, BAU, Kanke, Ranchi graced the programme as Chief Guest. He shared his views about ‘Ensuring Nutritional Security through bio-fortification’. He emphasized that by empowering women in agriculture and improving their access to technologies and services can bring extraordinary changes in the present agricultural production scenario of the country. He also gave reasonable solution that the nutritional security can be accessed by common people in a better way by adopting bio-fortified crops to people by public distribution system.

At the outset, Dr. Lipi Das, Principal Scientist and Nodal, World Food Day welcomed all highlighting on importance of World Food Day and the significance of this year’s theme of World Food Day. She also highlighted the alarming situation of malnutrition and rank of India in Global Hunger Index in post-pandemic condition. She also stressed upon the role of farm women in ensuring nutritional security by production of targeted Nutri-cereals (nutrition-rich crops) such as millets and promotion of homestead gardens and diversification of agriculture production.

At the end of the programme, vote of thanks was proposed by Dr. B. Sahoo, Principal Scientist of ICAR-CIWA on the behalf of organizing committee. About 100 participants participated in the programme.