Dehradun, Oct 6 (PTI) Universities and colleges across Uttarakhand will observe October 7 every year as ‘Garh Bhoj Diwas’ to celebrate the hill state’s traditional food and crops that are rich in nutritional and medicinal qualities. “It will familiarise our younger generation growing up on an overdose of junk food with the nutritional value of our traditional food and also their rich taste,” Dwarika Prasad Semwal, a social activist who has pioneered a mission to popularise the state’s traditional foods told PTI on Friday.
He added that Uttarakhand Health and Education Minister Dhan Singh Rawat has directed the vice-chancellors of the universities and the principals of various colleges to observe October 7 as ‘Garh Bhoj Diwas’.
Semwal said the universities and colleges will organise essay writing competitions, seminars and conferences on Saturday while highlighting the medicinal qualities of traditional cuisines and crops of Uttarakhand’s hills to mark the day. Semwal said that a letter asking the university vice-chancellors and college principals to celebrate the day as ‘Garh Bhoj Diwas’ on the campus and dispatch photos and videos of the programmes held to prove compliance with the orders was sent by Joint Director Higher Education SS Uniyal on Thursday. Semwal, who began the Garh Bhoj movement in Uttarakhand soon after its bifurcation from Uttar Pradesh in 2000, recalled how he started the initiative to popularise traditional hill food.
He said that a slogan “Koda-Jhangora Khayenge Uttarakhand Banayenge” often reverberated in the hills of Uttarakhand at the peak of the statehood movement. “The slogan had a direct appeal for me as I was a teenager at the time helping my father run a small eatery, which frequently served savoury local dishes made of manduwa and jhangora which grew abundantly in the village,” said Semwal. It was at that time when he realised that the “struggle for statehood was a movement for Uttarakhand’s separate identity and its traditional food and dishes were an integral part of it,” Semwal added.
When Uttarakhand was created in 2000, Semwal’s strong conviction about the delicious taste and high nutritional properties of traditional hill food set him on the mission to popularise a typical Uttarakhandi thali made of delicacies of the mountains named ‘Garh Bhoj’. ‘Garh Bhoj’ includes dishes, such as Manduwa, Jhangora and Koda like ‘mandue ka halwa’, ‘jhangore ki kheer’, ‘swale ki puri’, ‘gahat ka fanu’, ‘gahat ki patungi’ and ‘gahat ki roti’, based on crops growing in abundance in Uttarakhand, he said. Semwal said the traditional food and dishes of Uttarakhand apart from being tasty are high on nutrition and help build immunity.
It was one of the reasons why their consumption during the Covid-19 pandemic increased, he added.
Semwal further said the budgetary push to shree anna or millet, the celebration of 2023 as the millet year or the state government’s millet mission are also a recognition of medicinal properties of the traditional hill crops. “Mandua and jhangora for example are good for diabetes, gahat or kulthi soup for kidney stones and chaulai mujli for first stage cancer,” he added. PTI ALM AS RPA
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