Vegetable Oil In India

INTRODUCTION
Vegetable oil is an important component of human diet. Coconut, cottonseed, olive, palm kernel, peanut, rapeseed, soybean, and sunflower are some of the major oilseed crops. Demand from developing countries, biofuel initiatives, adverse weather patterns, rapidly increasing population and rising health concerns have driven the need for increase in the oil production. India is a vast country and inhabitants of several of its regions have developed specific preference for certain oils largely depending upon the oils available in the region. About 50% of domestic demand of edible oils in India is met through imports (Department of food and public distribution, Government of India, http://dfpd.nic.in/oil-division.htm). Increasing oilseed

It is most certainly a crop with unexploited potential and world adaptability. It can be grown in most cropping regions in the world between the latitudes of 50 degrees and 23 degrees in both the northern and southern hemispheres. Safflower’s ability to forage for sub soil moisture with its vigorous tap root, improved oil content and it versatility to produce Linoleic and Oleic oils makes it an obvious alternative to current crops grown in the more marginal cropping areas around the world.

India is one of the largest producers of safflower in the world, however; the productivity of safflower is very low. The main reasons for lower productivity are poor quality seeds, lower land holding, poor crop management, spiny nature of many cultivars, lack of proper irrigation and susceptibility to various biotic and abiotic stresses. Availability of hybrids alone has the potential to change the face of safflower cultivation in

Standard quality analyses like Soxhlet extraction for oil content and gas chromatography for fatty acid composition are laborious, time-consuming and difficult to perform for large sample size. A non-destructive method for the screening of seed samples would also allow high throughput analysis in plant breeding and genotype selection where the seeds of a genotype are limited. Near-infrared reflectance spectroscopy (NIRS) is a technique which has been used to screen intact seed samples for oil content and fatty acid composition in different species including rapeseed and sunflower. Studies on a worldwide safflower germplasm collection and on Indian safflower genebank accessions have shown that the oil content and fatty acid composition of intact seeds can be estimated by NIRS. The determination of the seed hull fraction and of the percentage of empty seeds is time consuming and complicated but important for the safflower breeding programs to increase oil