FSSAI has taken up a series of initiatives to transform India’s food safety and nutrition landscape by ensuring availability and consumption of safe food and healthy diets by its citizens. Eat Right School programme aims at creating awareness about food safety, nutrition & hygiene among school children, and through them among the community at large. Children are powerful change agents. Messages delivered to, and through children, have the potential to usher in behavioural change and a culture of safe and wholesome food. Since, food habits are developed early in life, adequate coverage of food and nutrition both in curriculum and extracurricular activities at the school level is essential.
In order to spread the awareness, it is imperative that schools participate actively in the Eat Right School initiative.
A) Yellow Book : Aimed at adoption of scientific & credible content into existing curriculum to increase outreach through education boards at the national & state level.
To this effect, FSSAI has developed ‘The Yellow Books’ to inculcate right eating habits. These are age appropriate in two volumes with each of them targeted at children from grade 1-8.
Available in 11 languages (English, Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Marathi, Telugu, Tamil, Malayalam, Kannada, Bengali & Assamese).
English version also available on DIKSHA - National Teacher’s Platform, created by MHRD for teachers across India.
B) Activity Book : - A fun-filled activity book has been designed to teach and reinforce the message of safe and nutritious food. Along with these, many activities are hosted on the website after login.
C) Combating Food Adulteration
C-i) DART Book : - The book is a compilation of 100 plus easy tests for Detecting Adulterants with Rapid Testing (DART) and covers common adulterants such as artificial and toxic colours etc. that can be conducted in the class by the teachers and students at home for practical testing and checking of adulteration in food at the home level.
C-ii) Food Safety Magic Box : - This has been developed by FSSAI with over 100 easy tests to check food adulteration and make science relevant for students through hands-on experiments that can be conducted using materials readily available in the laboratory.
D) Resource Material for Teachers/HWA : - A teacher training manual has also been developed to give an indepth understanding of the concepts on food safety and nutrition. This content can be integrated into the curriculum used for Teacher Training programs. Using the content, a network of Master Trainers has been created to disseminate training programs across India.
E) School Health Club :
A school health club could be created with an objective to promote and maintain behavioural change towards good hygiene practices and healthy eating habits. The club can have members from different classes and innovative activities could be organised. The unique activities will be showcased on the website which could be adopted by others.
The Eat Right School matrix has been conceptualized by FSSAI as a monitoring and evaluation tool to assist in creating a safe and wholesome environment from childhood. The matrix has been created for ease of implementing various school focussed programmes across ministries. This matrix is an amalgamation of the pre-requisites and desirables that each and every school must incorporate in their management/teaching practices.
Marking Scheme
Eat Right India’ movement, a flagship program of FSSAI aims to ensure health and well-being of people through its safe food, healthy and sustainable diets by a coordinated multi-sectoral approach. Given that food habits are formed early in life and difficult to change thereafter; the focus of ‘Eat Right India’ is on young people. A school is thus an obvious place where healthy eating habits may be formed at early stages in life. The Eat Right school program of FSSAI uses food as a pedagogical tool to bring in a sustainable change in the dietary habits of children. Young people are agents of change and their potential to influence entire families could be leveraged to change the way people eat. Under this movement, ‘Eat Right Creativity Challenge’ (ERCC) phase one was planned as a part of celebrations of the 150th year of Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday from 14Nov’18 –17Jan’19 to inculcate healthy eating habits through the own creativity of an individual. Over 75100 students participated through 3621 schools in Phase 1.
The Eat Right Creativity Challenge 2 was held from 16 th October 2020 – 16th December 2020. The online competition was held in 2 categories i.e. poster making and photography competition with the themes 'Eat Safe, Eat Healthy' and 'Food Safety during Covid-19'. A total of 4587 schools participated in phase 2.
The Eat Right Creativity Challenge 3 is being launched as part of the celebration of Azadi Ka Amrit Mahotsav to commemorate 75 years of India’s Independence. It aims to continue and tap the creative talent of students and enable them to inculcate healthy dietary habits. The competition aims to encourage schools to create an environment of healthy and safe food and to engage, excite and enable students to inculcate healthy habits on food and nutrition. It will make them aware about indigenous and traditional food as well as those which are local and seasonal. The competition will be held from 07th June-2022 – 31 st October 2022. ‘Eat Right Creativity Challenge Phase-3’ comprises of competitions to be held for school students in three categories, namely Eat Right Poster Competition, Eat Right Rangoli Competition and Eat Healthy Bulletin Board Decoration Competition. Eat Right Poster and Eat Right Rangoli are under individual category and Eat Healthy Bulletin Board is under Team category.
