Eat Right India Initiatives
The Eat Right India movement is a flagship initiative launched by the Food Safety and Standards Authority of India (FSSAI), which operates under the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Its primary objective is to transform the country’s food system to ensure safe, healthy, and sustainable food for all citizens.
The tagline of this movement is “Sahi Bhojan, Behtar Jeevan” (Right Food, Better Life). This initiative is crucial for India because the country faces a “double burden of malnutrition”—a situation where undernutrition (stunting and wasting) and overnutrition (obesity and lifestyle diseases) exist simultaneously.
The Three Core Pillars
To implement this vision, the FSSAI has launched several specific sub-initiatives:
1) Eat Safe :
- This pillar focuses on ensuring personal and environmental hygiene, safe food handling practices, and eliminating the use of harmful chemicals or adulterants in the food supply chain.
- It promotes basic hygiene in food manufacturing, street food vending, and household cooking.
2) Eat Healthy:
- This encourages citizens to consume a balanced diet.
- It promotes the intake of fortified foods (foods enriched with essential vitamins and minerals) and actively campaigns to reduce the daily consumption of salt, sugar, and trans-fats to prevent non-communicable diseases like diabetes and hypertension.
3) Eat Sustainable:
- This promotes environmentally friendly food practices.
- It encourages consuming local and seasonal foods, minimizing food waste, and phasing out single-use plastics by using safe and sustainable food packaging materials.
Key Programs Under Eat Right India
To implement this vision, the FSSAI has launched several specific sub-initiatives:
1) RUCO (Repurpose Used Cooking Oil):
- An initiative that enables the collection and conversion of used cooking oil to biodiesel.
- Repeated frying of oil makes it toxic and unfit for human consumption, so RUCO safely removes it from the food chain.
2) BHOG (Blissful Hygienic Offering to God):
- A program designed to encourage places of worship to adopt and maintain food safety and hygiene while preparing prasad (religious food offerings) and organizing community kitchens (langars).
3) Food Fortification (+F logo):
- FSSAI has made it mandatory to fortify staple foods like rice, wheat flour, oil, and milk with essential micronutrients (like Iron, Folic Acid, and Vitamin D) to fight hidden hunger (micronutrient deficiency).
- Fortified products are identified by the +F logo on their packaging.
4) Eat Right Campus / Eat Right Station:
- A certification program for schools, colleges, workplaces, and railway stations that successfully ensure safe, healthy, and hygienic food options for their students, employees, or passengers.
5) State Food Safety Index (SFSI):
- An annual index released by FSSAI to measure the performance of Indian States and Union Territories on various parameters of food safety, creating a competitive environment to improve public health.
Alignment with Global and National Goals
The Eat Right India initiative aligns perfectly with national programs like the POSHAN Abhiyaan (National Nutrition Mission) and Ayushman Bharat. Globally, it contributes to achieving the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), specifically Goal 2 (Zero Hunger) and Goal 3 (Good Health and Well-being).
