City students explore ways to ensure food security in India

Their research ranges from predicting drought to finding nutritional flowers

From cultivation of an endemic fish species to combating bacterial pathogens and predicting drought, science students across city colleges are researching on ways to ensure food security for the growing population of the country.

The experiments were highlighted at the recent Indian Youth Science Congress hosted by the Mumbai University. The theme of this year’s congress, which was jointly held by MS Swaminathan Research Foundation, SRM University and Rajiv Gandhi National Institute of Youth Development, was ‘Food for all in Anthropocene era’ — fulfilling nutritional needs of the population at a time when the human activity, or lack of it, greatly impacts the life on the planet.

At the congress last week, MS Swaminathan, renowned for his role in green revolution in India, said the biggest issues the nation faces are climate change and malnutrition. “Students should find solutions to these problems through research,” he said.

However, a number of students are already trying to find ways to improve food production in India. For the last six years, Rohit Nagalgaon, a PHD student at Sindhu Swaddhyay Sanstha at Kalina, has been working on cultivating Mahseer — an endemic species of fish — through a technique called fish ranching. The technique involves raising fishes from fingerling to yearling size by enclosing the fish in a cage or basket submerged in a natural water reserve like pond or river, which allows water to pass freely through the cage. “While fish ranching has been put to use in ponds, this is the first time the technique has been used in a river. So far, we have cultivated 50,000 fishes,” he said.

Similarly, Affan Karel, a BSC student from KC College at Churchgate, has been working on finding flowers with high nutritional value. Karel's experiment revealed that banana flowers can help maintain progestrone level in women as it contains Zinc, Copper, Calcium and Magnesium.

Similarly a group of students from Khalsa College, Matunga, have been trying to combat multidrug resistant (MDR) bacteria found in egg and meat. “We are working on isolation of MDR from food and combating it using aromatic oils,” said Vikas Jha, one of the researchers. Another group of engineering students from Vivekananda Education Society’s Institute of Technology claimed to have developed a technique to predict droughts. They proposed a Drought Determining Index which is calculated using previous years’ rainfall data.