Gur (Jaggery)

Gur or Jaggery is a typical Indian product with several uses in daily food preparations. It is unrefined sugar that has been made from sugar cane juice and is popular throughout southern and Southeast Asia. At present jaggery being produced in India has no set of any standards and at the time of manufacturing, no chemicals are added, it is pure natural. Production of gur is cheap and simple as compared to sugar production. Production of sugar is very expensive and complicated as it depends on heavily centralized, giant sugar plant including a complicated system of machinery. On the contrary, gur can be produced on the sugarcane farm only, on a very small scale and unlike sugar, no complicated machinery is needed.

The yield of gur from sugar cane depends mostly on the quality of the cane and the efficiency of the extraction of juice.

Muzaffarnagar district in Uttar Pradesh has the largest jaggery market in India, followed by Anakapalli of Visakhapatnam district in Andhra Pradesh. These are the biggest and second biggest in the entire world respectively.

Manufacturing Process
Jaggery manufacturing is done on a small scale by a group of farmers. It can be produced, just by boiling the pure clarified sugarcane juice. Then it is filtered and boiled in wide, shallow iron pans with continous stirring and, simultaneously soda juice is added in required quantity. While boiling, brownish foams come at the top which are continuously removed to get golden yellow colour of jaggery. The consistency of the juice becomes thick and then it is poured into the small to medium sized iron or aluminum cans where blocks of jaggery are formed after cooling. Size of the blocks can vary from 1 kg. to 12 kgs. Finally, these blocks are packed in gunny bags. From 100 kgs. of sugarcane, 10 kgs. of jaggery is made. . There is only 5% or even less capital requirement for making gur as compared to sugar production. That is why it is within the reach of common sugarcane farmers also.

The process flow chart is as under:

Major Producers are : Brazil, India, EU, China and USA
Major Importer: Russia, Indonesia
Major Exporter: Brazil, EU, Thailand, Australia

Uses of Gur
· It provides health nutrition value.
· It is used to purify the blood and regulate the liver function.
· It is used for sweating milk, and preparing tea.
· It contains proteins, minerals and vitamins, which are essential constituents for the body.