<![CDATA[India’s nutrition profile reflects a nutrition transition rather than a single narrative: a rapidly escalating burden of diet-related non-communicable disease, including an estimated 101 million people with diabetes, coexists with a severe and worsening burden of micronutrient deficiency, with anaemia affecting 57% of women and 67.1% of children. This narrative review examines millets, small-seeded cereals historically marginalised in Indian diets in favour of rice and wheat, as a preventive dietary intervention with plausible relevance to both ends of this transition. Evidence was drawn from peer-reviewed systematic reviews and meta-analyses, national survey data and documented delivery interventions, identified through searches of PubMed and Google Scholar (2016–2026). The evidence is strongest for glycaemic outcomes: the mean glycaemic index of millets is about 36% lower than that of milled rice, and a meta-analysis reports significant reductions in fasting and post-prandial glucose, although the pooled effect on HbA1c is not statistically significant. The evidence for anaemia is supportive but less direct: millet consumption has been associated with higher haemoglobin, but mineral bioavailability is limited by anti-nutritional factors, no study compared millet-based diets with iron-folic acid supplementation, and anaemia has several determinants beyond dietary iron. Evidence on delivery comes from a single-district pilot, in which household demand was high and the main frictions were administrative. Millets are a plausible component of a diversified preventive diet in India, with the firmest case for glycaemic risk and a more tentative case for anaemia; they are not established as a stand-alone remedy for either condition. Future research should prioritise India-specific comparative trials, independently verified compositional analysis and implementation research at scale.]]>
