Union agriculture minister Shivraj Singh Chouhan has ordered the renaming of the National Food Security Mission, his ministry’s flagship programme to boost output of key crops, to the Rashtriya Khadya Suraksha Evam Poshan Yojana and reoriented its focus towards meeting nutrition goals rather than setting mere food-output targets, officials said.

The new name in Hindi, which translates to National Food Security and Nutrition Scheme, aims to address concerns at a time when the country is striving to bring down the incidence of anaemia, stunting and wasting among children. It also fits in with the government’s broader revivalist idea of using names in Hindi instead of English for government programmes.

The changes are aimed at making the programme resonate better with farmers and tackle malnutrition, a person familiar with the matter said.

The scheme will now have provisions for promoting traditional nutrient-dense crop varieties which are going out of circulation, such as coarse cereals and local grains rich in micronutrients such as vitamins and minerals, thios person added.

Chouhan recently reviewed the federally sponsored scheme launched in 2007 and decided to make it a component of the Krishi Samvardhan Yojana, an umbrella programme to increase farmers’ incomes.

The changes will provide greater flexibility and subsidies for farmers and seed producers, a second official said. “It will build on existing frameworks to create a more cohesive and impactful strategy for achieving food security and nutrition goals in India,” the official added.

The National Food Security Mission focused on cereals, oilseeds and pulses, setting annual food-production targets. The original goals were to increase the annual production of rice by 10 million tonnes, wheat by 8 million tonnes and pulses by 2 million tonnes by the end of the Eleventh Plan (2011-12).

Provisional official data showed the Centre gave states ₹828 crore in all as its share of the mission. The latest additional target set in Sept last year was to bring additional 20000 hectares of area under coarse cereal, apart from distribution of hybrid maize seeds. 

“The revamped scheme will now focus on enhancing seed availability of traditional varieties of crops, coarse cereals and Shree Anna (millets), which offer more nutritional value,” a second official said. The scheme will provide funds for propagation and storage of seeds of such field crops at the panchayat level, the person added.

Chouhan asked officials to ensure that the beneficiaries of the rejigged scheme are genuine farmers and not commercial entities, the first official said.

According to the National Family Health Mission (NFHS)-5 (2019-21), the nutrition indicators for children under five years of age have improved as compared with NFHS-4 (2015-16). However, it found that 38.4% of children were stunted. Wasting has reduced from 21.0% to 19.3% and the underweight prevalence rate stood at 32.1%.

“The revamped scheme has to be geared towards increasing market returns of nutritious food crops. Improving the seed replacement rate should help in higher productivity,” said K Mani, a former agronomist of the Tamil Nadu Agricultural University.