The Hindu Business Line : Green diet

Tackling chronic anaemia in rural women has been a tough challenge for successive governments; health planners with projects like the 20-year-old anaemia control programme have not been able to successfully contain this menace.

Dr Shobha Rao, a Pune-based research scientist with the Agharkar Research Institute, is winding up an exhaustive two-year-old nutrition programme that has helped rural women improve their haemoglobin levels and general health dramatically by just including green leafy vegetables in their everyday food. The project, aided by the Department of Science and Technology (DOST), was carried out in villages on Pune's outskirts.

"Since the symptoms are not very obvious, many women go on with their daily chores without paying attention to their fatigue. Many of them keep silent because they don't want to be accused of being lazy and shirking work by pleading illness," says Dr Rao. Thanks to the study, women can now take charge of their health with low-cost, home-grown vegetables. Six months into it, community health workers, monitoring the women participating in the project, found that the haemoglobin levels of over 30 per cent of them went up by 1.2 grams, while that of some 25 per cent showed no change. "We found that the women whose haemoglobin levels went up were the ones who strictly maintained the prescribed routine, while the rest were irregular."

Encouraged by results, DOST has invited Dr Raoto help extend the project to villages across India through a comprehensive programme.

"It would seem like the most obvious thing for women in our villages to eat plenty of green leafy vegetables, considering that these are grown in abundance there," says Dr Rao. "The reality is that most of them don't cook any because their husbands and children don't like them, and also because they are sent to the cities directly from the farm and the woman has no time to go to the farm for her supply."

Dr Rao and her team have done extensive studies on nutrition trends amongst the rural poor, especially women; they found that cooking greens did not make sense for women because they need huge quantities for the entire family. "They were also not aware of different recipes; just seasoning the greens with onion resulted in very small quantities, insufficient for the entire family."

Dr Rao's team has tried to work around this problem by formulating over 60 recipes, holding cookery demonstrations using green vegetables and actually serving them to women and their children during their monthly vaccination rounds. The project also helps women start kitchen gardens. "In the case of landless labourers, we have taught women to grow the greens in soil-filled gunny bags which they keep outside their homes," says Dr Rao.

She adds that they are adding finishing touches to a recipe booklet in Marathi which will feature about 100 recipes using greens. "Raw pachadi, rice cooked with spring onions and cabbage, the traditional besan pithla with methi leaves or their bhakris with spinach and mint, the women suddenly know scores of ways to make their meals nutritional."

An estimated 70 per cent of pregnant women in rural India suffer from anaemia, while 50-60 per cent of young girls become anaemic at some point in their lives. In an earlier study, Dr Rao says the team found a strong correlation between the amount of milk, greens and locally grown fruits consumed by pregnant women and their foetal development.

Dr Rao plans to organise a workshop to sensitise NGOs and government health workers from other states on the goodness of greens. She also wants to train women to dry the greens for use during the off-season and other ways of preserving the nutritional content of greens.

"Eating folic acid tablets prescribed by the doctor is fine, but it is simpler for these women to grow vegetables and use them, instead of worrying about procuring the tablets from the authorities concerned," signs off Dr Rao.

Picture by P.V. Sivakumar