Importance of underutilized vegetables grown in all over India

Underutilized vegetables are can also keep the population healthy and nutritionally secure rather than costly off season one. Thus they have the nutritional capacity to prevent and cure diseases like Kwashiorkor, marasmus, night blindness, anemia, diabetes, cancer, hypertension and hidden hunger.

- Pradipta Dutta, Sohini Talukdar

Underutilized vegetables are a rich source of CHOs, fats, proteins, energy, vitamins- A, B1, B2, B3, B6, B9, B12, Vit-C, folic acid and minerals-Calcium, P, Fe and dietary fiber.

Many traditional or indigenous vegetables are characterized by a high nutritional value compared with global vegetables like tomato and cabbage. As source of essential vitamins, micronutrients, protein and other phytonutrients, traditional vegetables and underutilized legume crops such as mung bean have the potential to play a major role in strategies to attain nutritional security. Experiments with home gardens in India including about two dozen vegetable species have shown that a small area of 6 m × 6 m can provide much of the vitamin A and C requirement for a family of four during the entire year. Apart from the provision of essential vitamins, many of the vegetable crops included in home garden kits are known to be naturally nutrient-dense (Hughes et al., 2013).

Community-based seed conservation and multiplication has been used in the Philippines as an approach to enhance the adoption of nutrient-dense traditional vegetables and to generate additional farm income (Ebert et al., 2013). Given the high farmer acceptance, the continuation and expansion of this approach to the entire Bicol region has been proposed under the Regional High Value Commercial Crops (HVCC) Program of the Department of Agriculture to ensure the availability of high quality traditional vegetable seed for home garden and commercial production.

The potentiality of Some Underutilized crops

Many underutilized species can make an important contribution to a better diet for human being which should not be underestimated like-