Basmati exporter files two patents on parboiling technology

Grain traders are rarely known for shop-floor innovations or even possessing detailed knowledge of production processes. So when one see a basmati rice exporter filing two patents relating to parboiling process in paddy, it is probably worth taking note of.

Mr Vijay Setia, Director of Chaman Lal Setia Exports Ltd – a Rs 200-crore Karnal-based firm owning the ‘Maharani' and ‘Begum' basmati brands – claims to have invented “a system and method for parboiling paddy” that prevents the husk from splitting, enabling millers to reduce the percentage of broken rice.

Parboiling involves soaking the paddy (rough rice) in hot water and steaming it to gelatinise or swell the starch, making the kernel tougher. The steamed paddy, containing up to 40 per cent moisture, is dried by passing hot air. Once dried, the par-boiled rice is regularly milled, i.e. de-husked to produce brown rice and further polished to remove the bran.

According to Mr Setia, in typical parboiling, the soaking takes place in a tank, where the hot water supplied through an inlet agitates the paddy and causes the husk to split. The split husk tends to open further during steaming and subsequent drying, with the opened grains drying at a faster rate. Uneven drying and high number of split husk paddy, in turn, yields more broken rice on milling.

“If you mill 100 kg of parboiled paddy, it would yield some 65 kg of rice, of which the broken proportion would be 7 to 18 per cent depending on the variety. What I have devised is an improved parboiling technique that reduces husk splitting and brings down the brokens range to 4-8 per cent,” said Mr Setia, who has filed a patent (No. 3029/DEL/2010) for the purported invention.

The second patent (No. 1874/DEL/2010) concerns a process of paddy soaking in parboiling that saves fresh water consumption up to 80 per cent. Soaking a tonne of paddy requires 1.2 to 1.3 tonnes of water. At the same time, only 20-30 per cent of this water is consumed, with the remaining being drained into an effluent treatment plant for re-use as fresh water. “My process allows reuse of the excess paddy soak wastewater as such, without it requiring further treatment in subsequent batches of parboiling,” claimed Mr Sethia. Having filed the patents, “my next step would be to work with parboiling machinery manufacturers to incorporate these inventions”, he added.

While stating that the inventions were his own, Mr Sethia, however, acknowledged his interactions with leading scientists and grain processing technologists, including Dr P. Pillaiyar of the Processing Research Centre, Thanjavur and Dr B.S. Modi of the Indian Agricultural Research Institute's Regional Station at Karnal.

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