Key Points
India's pilot studies on rice fortification showed that nutritional anaemia could be reduced, with a significant drop in the prevalence of anaemia among schoolchildren, according to a United Nations report...
Through its World Food Programme, the UN supported national and state governments with a unique pilot-to-scale approach that could be "useful in countries where governments are not yet fully convinced about fortification"...
As per the report, the pilots generated the proof needed to go big on India's fragmented rice industry and the large scale of social assistance programmes..
These pilots effectively demonstrated that rice fortification could be rolled out through existing social assistance distribution systems and costs could be lowered through economies of scale, according to the UN...
After witnessing the success and feasibility of the pilots, in 2021 the government announced that all rice distributed through the three food-based social assistance programmes would be fortified by 2024...
