Abstract

Natural coloured food used to supplement required balanced nutrition for good physical and mental health. Such coloured diets have slowly vanished owing to various reasons. Such deficiency causing in malnutrition irrespective of rich and poor and resulting in shooting up of the spike of various diseases. Bharat Ratna Professor M.S. Swaminathan, the World renowned agriculturist had taken various programme like Zero hunger drive: ‘LANSA’ & FSN with realistic approaches to combat hunger and malnutrition. He emphasized more and more on local resources with high nutritional values, considering easy availability, accessibility and affordability of such resources by all sections of the society. Sweet potato (Ipomoea batatas L.) is traditional food and super food for its calorie and vitamins contents. It can be easily available among small, marginal farming communities. Sweet potato breeders of ICAR-CTCRI were working on improvement of sweet potato. The breeders have developed spectrum of coloured flesh sweet potato in orange containing beta carotene (10-16mg/100g) and purple containing anthocyanine (60-100mg/100g). Among various coloured flesh sweet potato, Bhu Sona and Bhu Krishna are gaining momentum in nutritional programme of the country. Besides, these varieties can perform well in hilly backward and coastal areas. Breeders also raised varied spectrum of coloured breeding lines having more nutrients and starch (>18%) with minimum weevil infestation (0-10%) for future programme. Enrichment of sweet potato native starch into resistant starch (RS4) is user friendly for diet related ailments. Such modifications of starch & development of spectrum of coloured flesh sweet potatoes satisfy disruptive innovation matrix.