Prabhu Pingali, director of the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI), has been inducted as a Pravasi Fellow of India’s National Academy of Agricultural Sciences (NAAS). The Pravasi Fellowship is awarded to expatriate Indians for their contributions to the agricultural sciences in India. The founding director of TCI, Pingali is a faculty member in the Charles…

TCI director Prabhu Pingali says the Indian government should refocus its agricultural policy on the production of diverse, nutrient-rich crops to reduce hunger and malnutrition. Writing in the Daily Pioneer, Pingali argued that India’s focus on staple grains like wheat and rice has contributed to stubbornly high rates of malnutrition in the country. Pingali’s op-ed presented the findings…

In a report published July 17, researchers from the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) show that India’s rigorous lockdown has driven up the price of produce, limiting people’s ability to afford a nutritionally diverse diet. In the study, Pandemic Prices: Price Shocks from COVID-19 and Their Implications on Nutrition Security in India, TCI analyzed…

TCI’s latest report, Food, Agriculture, and Nutrition in India 2020: Leveraging Agriculture to Achieve Zero Hunger (FAN 2020), focuses on the extent of hunger and malnutrition in India in the context of Sustainable Development Goal 2 (SDG2), which calls for zero hunger and an end to malnutrition by 2030. Using district-level maps and data, the report lays…

With some 200 million people suffering, India has relatively high rates of hunger compared with the rest of the world. However, malnutrition is not uniform throughout the country, and its prevalence corresponds to the uneven levels of economic development between different regions. According to a new report from the Tata-Cornell Institute for Agriculture and Nutrition (TCI) that…

In this blog post, which originally appeared as an op-ed piece in Food Security, TCI alumna Anaka Aiyar and director Prabhu Pingali advocate for investments in food safety as part of the response to COVID-19. Abstract Recent large-scale pandemics such as the covid19, H1N1, Swine flu, Ebola and the Nipah virus, which impacted human health and livelihoods, have come about…

“What happened to it?” I asked one woman after she reported that the hermetic (air-tight) grain sack we had given her wasn’t being used in her storage facility. She grinned sheepishly. A giggling daughter guided us through the courtyard and gestured to a corner shaded by a thatched roof. I was baffled to see the…

In this blog post, TCI scholar Jocelyn Boiteau explores how the plastic crates used to protect tomatoes at the market carry occupational risks for laborers.  In Andhra Pradesh’s bustling Madanapalle tomato market, where tomatoes are auctioned in bulk, the buzz of activity is periodically broken up by a crash of empty crates tossed to the ground. Men…

In developing countries like India, people in rural areas often subsist on diets of mostly cereal grains which lack important micronutrients, leading to a range of maladies, including anemia, stunting, low birth weight, and more. In a newly published article in the Food and Nutrition Bulletin, Tata-Cornell Institute (TCI) researchers investigate how farm production diversity and…

This piece from the TCI 2019-20 Annual Report explores TCI scholar Anshuman Gupta’s study of a community-based aquaculture program in India. Download the full annual report to read more. Across India, organizing women into self-help groups has been one of the more popular methods used for empowering women and lifting them out of poverty. This is particularly…