Production of Rice Bran Oil in India: a Technical Evaluation

India has the highest utilization of rice bran oil in terms of the available resources in the country.Parboiled rice tradition has made the available rice bran in relatively good quality.This makes the quality of crude rice bran oil being also high.Therefore the following processing is made relatively simple comparing with those high free fatty acid content crude rice bran oils.In India,physical refining is commonly used.Thus the oil refining yield is usually high.The unsaponifiable content is also higher comparatively.For example,oryzanol content is usually 1%to 1.5%in weight.Although there are a large number of rice bran oil small plants in India,the technology is relatively mature for the production of relatively good quality rice bran oil.In this short overview of the production technology of rice bran oil in India,the state of the art has been elaborated in a simple form.Particularly,the problems and challenges of the production technology have been evaluated with the background of decades of research and technology development work in India.