Assam’s Kokrajhar district feasts on mushrooms for health and wealth

Subject : Science and technology

Section: Health

Context:

Nutrient-loaded mushrooms introduced into the midday meals in western Assam’s Kokrajhar district, as soups, biscuits, fortified noodles, or mixed with regular food in powdered form, appear to have had a positive nutritional effect on children in schools.

Details:

Mushrooms were one of the major ingredients introduced for children and mothers, in addition to vitamin and mineral supplementation.

Metric	Statistical improvement in Kokrajhar district (as per the Data from district authorities
Number of Underweight children (upto 6 years)	Reduced by 56%
Number of Wasted children	Reduced by 55%
Number of Anaemic children	Reduced by 76%
Maternal Mortality Rate	Decreased by 72.37% to stand at 89.79 per lakh live births ( Assam’s MMR is 205)
Infant Mortality rate	Decreased by 30.56% to 15.97 per 1000 live births (Assam’s IMR is 36)

Origin of the initiative:

Initiated by the Bodoland University’s Department of Biotechnology in 2012.
Its experiments on making 23 species of mushrooms such as oyster, shitake, and cordyceps economically viable and affordable, made many farmers start cultivation in their backyards, sometimes even under beds.
Bodoland Territorial Council (BTC) launched the Mushroom Mission in 2021.
In 2021, Kokrajhar changed its product from Eri silk to mushroom under the One District One Product (ODOP) initiative.
More than 21,500 mushroom cultivators, including members of 503 self-help groups, are women.

Tackling farm waste:

Women were attracted because of high returns on low investments.
they earn up to ₹400 per bag of moistened hay for an input cost of ₹35.
Growing mushroom is also not labour-intensive.
The “mushroom movement” has also helped people deal with 0.16 million tonnes of farm waste (rice, wheat, and maize residue) compressed into layered bags for growing the mushrooms. After these bags stop producing, they are turned into vermicompost.
The district administration facilitated the export of 220 kg mushrooms, sourced from individual farmers, to Bhutan where the demand is high but conditions are not suitable for growing them unlike in Kokrajhar.
ODOP has seen 16 schools in the district taking up mushroom farming in their nutrigardens along with an array of vegetables.
It has also helped revive the mushroom spawn labs in 11 government-run senior secondary schools across the Bodoland Territorial Region that were set up under a three-year Department of Biotechnology scheme in 2015.

Mushroom:

A mushroom or toadstool is the fleshy, spore-bearing fruiting body of a fungus, typically produced above ground, on soil, or on its food source.
A toadstool generally denotes one poisonous to humans.