Calcium Rich Foods in India: Exact Milligrams per 100 g, Including Calcium in Curd, Milk, Ragi and Til

Short answer: start with these calcium rich foods in India: til, ragi, paneer, curd, milk and dark greens. Per 100 g the ICMR-NIN 2017 tables give black til 1,664 mg and white til 1,283 mg. Paneer is 476 mg. Ragi is 364 mg. Amaranth leaves are 330 mg. Drumstick leaves are 314 mg. Methi leaves are 274 mg. Buffalo milk is 121 mg and cow milk is 118 mg. Curd is not in those tables at all. Its honest number is about 118 to 121 mg per 100 g. Adults need 1,000 mg a day.

Most calcium lists for Indian food are copies of copies. This one is not. Every milligram below is read off the Indian Food Composition Tables 2017. Those tables come from the ICMR National Institute of Nutrition. They are the current edition of India's own food tables.

Some foods are not in them. Curd is one. Curd is also the most asked-about food on this page. Where that happens we say so. Then we show the chain we used instead. Nothing here is a number we made up.

How Much Calcium Do You Need in a Day?

Short answer: 1,000 mg a day for adult Indian men and women. That is the ICMR-NIN recommended dietary allowance from 2020. The 2010 allowance was 600 mg. So the target nearly doubled in one revision. The estimated average requirement is 800 mg.

The ICMR National Institute of Nutrition publishes India's own nutrient requirements. Its brief note on nutrient requirements sets out the comparison for adults.

Teenagers need more. The 2024 Dietary Guidelines for Indians say their allowances are about 850 to 1050 mg a day. The same guideline asks for more than that during the growth years. The reason is peak bone mass. It also names the foods it wants those years built on: milk, curd, sesame seeds, ragi and green leafy vegetables like amaranth.

Why the jump from 600 to 1,000 matters. Almost every Indian calcium article was written against the old 600 mg target. A diet that cleared the 2010 bar can sit 40 per cent short of the 2020 one. Nothing about the diet has to change for that to happen.

Calcium in Curd (Dahi) per 100 g: The Honest Answer

Short answer: about 118 to 121 mg per 100 g. That is the same as the milk it was set from. This is the most searched question on this page. It is also the worst answered one online. The Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 have no curd, dahi or yoghurt row at all. Search the whole document. The only hit is a journal title in the bibliography.

So where does an honest number come from? Three links. Each one is checkable.

One. The FSSAI dairy standards say it plainly. Chapter 2.1, clause 2.1.13 on Fermented Milk Products reads: “Plain Dahi shall have the same minimum percentage of milk fat and milk solids-not-fat as that of the milk, as provided for in the Standard for Milk, from which it is prepared.” Calcium lives in the solids-not-fat fraction. Setting milk into curd does not add minerals. It does not remove any either. It adds bacteria.

Two. The same chapter sets the floors those solids must meet. Buffalo milk needs at least 5.0 per cent fat and 9.0 per cent solids-not-fat. Cow milk needs at least 3.2 per cent fat and 8.3 per cent solids-not-fat.

Three. The Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 measured the milk itself. Whole cow milk is 118 mg of calcium per 100 g. Whole buffalo milk is 121 mg per 100 g.

Put the three together. Plain dahi set at home from ordinary milk carries roughly 118 to 121 mg per 100 g. An independent cross-check agrees. USDA FoodData Central record 171284 is plain whole-milk yogurt. It lists 121 mg of calcium, 3.47 g of protein and 61 kcal per 100 g.

Curd calcium by katori, cup and kilo

Set curd weighs close to the milk it came from. So you can treat millilitres and grams as the same thing at home. Weigh your own katori once if you want to be exact.

The same FSSAI clause gives you two more numbers. Fermented milks must carry a minimum milk protein of 2.9 per cent. And the live starter organisms must number not less than 10 million colony-forming units per gram. We did the protein side of curd separately in dahi protein per 100 g. The Hinglish version of the daily-curd question sits in dahi khane ke fayde.

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Straining changes the answer. When you make hung curd you pour the whey away. Some calcium leaves with it. Most of the lactose leaves too. Thick strained curd is not the same food as the curd it came from. Our guides to making hung curd at home and straining Greek yogurt cover the method. Greek yogurt vs curd covers the difference. Curd protein has the protein numbers.

Milk, Curd, Paneer and Khoa: Calcium per 100 g

Short answer: paneer is the calcium heavyweight of Indian dairy. It holds 476 mg per 100 g, roughly four times milk or curd. Khoa is higher still at 602 mg. But khoa is a sweet-shop ingredient, not a daily food. Milk and curd sit together at 118 to 121 mg, because curd is simply set milk.

Paneer wins per 100 g for a simple reason. Making it removes water and keeps the solids. That is also why nobody eats 100 g of paneer as a side dish. A normal helping is a few cubes. Making paneer at home is the cheapest way to eat more of it. Paneer protein per 100 g has the other half of the picture.

A quiet fact worth knowing. The ICMR-NIN 2024 guidelines call milk “the best source of available calcium”. The same sentence calls it a poor source of iron. Both halves are true. The second half is why a milk-heavy diet still needs dal and greens.

Calcium in 24 Indian Foods, per 100 g (ICMR-NIN 2017)

Short answer: here is the table, read straight off the 2017 tables. Values are milligrams of calcium per 100 g of the food as analysed. They are rounded to the nearest milligram. Dry foods like chana and rajma are listed at dry weight.

Two things jump out. Seeds and greens beat dairy per 100 g, and they beat it easily. And look at the chana rows. Whole kala chana is 150 mg. Chana dal is 46 mg. That gap is not a rounding error. It is the husk. The same food, split and polished, loses most of its calcium.

The 2024 guidelines also publish an average for each food group. It is a useful sanity check when a food is missing from the table above.

Green leafy vegetables average 279.3 mg per 100 g. Cereals average 18.1 mg. That one comparison is most of the Indian calcium story. The saag is doing the work. The roti is not.

Ragi vs Milk: Which Has More Calcium?

Short answer: ragi, per 100 g, and it is not close. Ragi is 364 mg. Whole cow milk is 118 mg. But nobody eats 100 g of ragi flour in one sitting. Nobody drinks 100 ml of milk either. Per real serving the two land within about 20 mg of each other.

So here is the honest answer to a question the internet loves to oversell. Ragi is a genuinely excellent calcium food. It is the highest of any cereal or millet in the Indian tables. It does not replace milk. It stacks with it.

Bajra, by contrast, is only 27 mg per 100 g. Millets are not interchangeable.

The easiest way to eat that 60 g is to stop treating ragi as a health project. Ragi roti that does not crack, ragi dosa and ragi porridge are the three that stick in most homes. Ragi benefits and ragi flour cover the wider picture. Bajra and the millets guide cover the rest of the family. The millets list has the regional names. If you are buying, ragi flour is stocked everywhere now.

Til (Sesame): The Biggest Number in the Indian Tables

Short answer: black til is 1,664 mg of calcium per 100 g. White til is 1,283 mg. Those are the densest calcium foods in the Indian tables. The catch is the serving size. One level tablespoon is about 10 g. That is 166 mg from black til and 128 mg from white. A spoon a day is a real contribution.

Indian kitchens already have the habits. Til chutney with idli. Til in the tadka. Til laddoo in winter. A sprinkle over sabzi. You do not need a new recipe. You need the jar within reach. White til and black til are both cheap. They keep for months in an airtight dabba.

Roast it, do not just add it. Whole raw sesame often passes through unchewed. Light roasting and coarse crushing open the seed. That is how til chutney and til laddoo are made anyway. This is a chewing point, not a chemistry one. It applies to flax and other small seeds too.

What Your Body Actually Absorbs

Short answer: the milligrams on a table are not the milligrams you keep. In controlled studies, milk calcium was absorbed at 27.6 to 32.1 per cent. Kale came in at 40.9 per cent. Spinach managed just 5.1 per cent. Absorption also falls as the dose rises. It was 64.0 per cent at tiny loads and 28.6 per cent at a 500 mg load.

Four studies do most of the useful work here. All four were done the same rigorous way. The food itself is labelled with a calcium tracer. So what is measured is the calcium from that food. It is not a supplement stirred into it.

Read those four rows together. The practical rules write themselves.

Spread calcium across the day. Do not load one meal. The same total in smaller amounts is absorbed at a better rate. Do not build your calcium on oxalate-heavy greens. And take phytate seriously but not too seriously. It cost about ten percentage points in the soybean study. Soaking, sprouting, fermenting and pressure cooking all pull that back.

The one number to remember. Spinach was absorbed at 5.1 per cent. That is why a food can look high in calcium on paper and still be a poor calcium source. Palak is a fine vegetable. It is a bad calcium plan.

What Blocks Calcium, and What Helps

Short answer: four things work against you. They are oxalate, phytate, too much salt and very high protein-powder intakes. Four things work for you. They are sunlight, soaking and pressure cooking, fermentation, and simply splitting your calcium across meals.

The four blockers

The four helpers

Vitamin D deserves its own paragraph. Without it, the rest of this page does very little. We covered it in vitamin D foods for Indians and vitamin D deficiency signs. The 2024 guidelines add one more free lever. Regular exercise reduces calcium loss and strengthens bone.

Do Indians Really Fall Short?

Short answer: yes. The most convincing evidence is the guideline's own arithmetic. The balanced diet ICMR-NIN recommends for an older adult works out to about 844 mg a day. That is short of its own 1,000 mg allowance. Two measured Indian samples land lower still, at about 393 mg and 500 mg a day.

This is where invented statistics are most common. So here is exactly what is measurable, and where it comes from.

Both studies are single-city samples. They are not national surveys. Treat them as indicative rather than final. But the direction is not in doubt. And note what the top of that table says. The guideline's own model diet falls about 156 mg short of the guideline's own allowance. This is a structural gap in how India eats. It is not a personal failing.

A Day of Indian Food That Reaches 1,000 mg

Short answer: it takes two dosas, a glass of milk and a katori of curd. Add one methi sabzi, a spoon of til and a handful of badam. On the 2017 table values that adds to about 1,101 mg. The arithmetic is shown, so you can swap items in and out.

Two caveats, because this is arithmetic and not a promise. The table values are for the food as analysed. Soaking, cooking and draining will shift the real number either way. And intake is not the same as absorption. Getting 1,101 mg on the plate is not the same as keeping it. That is exactly why the day above spreads the calcium across four sittings.

The ICMR-NIN plate is built the same way. It puts 300 ml of milk or curd into every day. Alongside that it asks for 400 g of vegetables and greens, 85 g of pulses, 35 g of nuts and seeds, and 250 g of cereals and millets. Hit that plate and the calcium mostly takes care of itself.

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If mornings are the problem, a blended breakfast is the least effortful fix. Curd, a spoon of til, ragi flour and a banana in one bottle. Our sattu drink and green smoothie recipes follow the same idea. Curd rice is the low-effort evening version.

If Milk Does Not Suit You

Short answer: you do not have to choose between a bad stomach and weak bones. The ICMR-NIN 2024 advice is specific. Reduce the quantity taken at a time. Take it with a cereal-pulse meal. Or take the milk in the form of curd. Curd carries the same calcium as its milk, with much of the lactose already fermented.

How common this is in India varies by region. It is not one national number. A genetic study of lactase persistence across Indian regional groups looked at 227 healthy Indian subjects. It found the highest persistence among North Indians and the lowest among Parsis. South Indians came in lower than North Indians. If you have seen one confident percentage quoted for “Indians”, treat it with suspicion. We could not trace one to a source worth printing.

What works in practice, in order of how easily people stick to it? Curd instead of milk. Paneer instead of milk. Milk with a meal rather than on an empty stomach. And smaller amounts more often. Curd vs yogurt explains what fermentation actually changes. Curd benefits covers the wider case for eating dahi daily.

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Calcium Without Dairy

Short answer: it is entirely doable on Indian food. But it takes seeds and greens, not substitutes. Til, ragi, amaranth leaves, drumstick leaves, methi, whole chana, rajma and almonds are all in the table above. Between them they clear 1,000 mg without a drop of milk.

Here is a worked no-dairy day, again on the 2017 values. 10 g of black til is 166 mg. 60 g of ragi is 218 mg. A 100 g katori of amaranth leaves is 330 mg. 100 g of drumstick leaves is 314 mg. And 30 g of almonds is 68 mg. That is 1,096 mg from five ordinary items.

Two cautions. Several of those are seeds and legumes. That means phytate. So the soaking and pressure cooking from the helpers table is not optional for you. Second, the figures for chana, rajma and soybean are dry weights. The grain soaks up water as it cooks. So a cooked katori delivers less than the dry value suggests.

Rajgira or amaranth flour is the easiest of these to slip into everyday atta. A digital kitchen scale settles the portion arguments once and for all. For the protein side of a no-dairy diet, see rajma protein and soya chunks protein.

दूध के अलावा कैल्शियम कहाँ से मिलेगा?

Short answer: काले तिल में सबसे ज्यादा कैल्शियम होता है। प्रति 100 ग्राम यह 1,664 mg है। सफेद तिल 1,283 mg देता है। पनीर 476 mg, रागी 364 mg, चौलाई 330 mg, सहजन के पत्ते 314 mg और मेथी 274 mg। दही और दूध दोनों में लगभग 118 से 121 mg होता है।

रोज़ कितना कैल्शियम चाहिए? ICMR-NIN 2020 के अनुसार बड़ों को रोज़ 1,000 mg। पालक को कैल्शियम का स्रोत मत मानिए। उसमें ऑक्सलेट होता है। एक अध्ययन में पालक से सिर्फ 5.1 per cent कैल्शियम ही शरीर ने लिया।

Why Other Sites Show Different Numbers

Short answer: because most of them quote an older edition of the Indian food tables. India published food composition tables in 1937, 1951, 1963, 1971 and 1989. The current edition is 2017. Several calcium values moved a long way when the foods were re-analysed. The older figures are still being copied from site to site.

That history is set out in the preface of the 2017 tables themselves. The edition before it was the 1989 revision of Nutritive Value of Indian Foods. Check any page that quotes calcium for ragi, sesame, drumstick leaves, methi, paneer or chana. If the figure does not match the table above, it is almost certainly reading from an edition that is over three decades old.

And there is the curd problem. When a page confidently gives you a curd figure “from IFCT 2017”, you now know something its author did not. There is no curd row in IFCT 2017 to quote. That does not make every such figure wrong. Ours lands in the same range. But the citation is not real. We would rather show you the three-step chain and let you check it.

How to check any number on this page. Open the Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 PDF. Go to the minerals table. Find the food code printed beside each food in our table. The calcium column is the fourth numeric column, after aluminium, arsenic and cadmium. It takes about two minutes. You should not have to take our word for any of it.

If You Think You Are Short

Short answer: low calcium does not announce itself early. The symptoms it eventually produces overlap with a dozen other things. That makes self-diagnosis a poor idea and a blood test a good one. We wrote the symptom side up separately.

The detail lives in calcium deficiency symptoms Indians should not ignore. Two honest points belong on this page though. Blood calcium is tightly regulated. So a normal reading does not by itself prove your intake is adequate. And supplements are a medical decision, not a grocery one. The ICMR-NIN guidelines are consistent that food comes first. The dose question belongs with your doctor.

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Common Questions About Calcium in Indian Food

Sources and References

• ICMR-NIN, Indian Food Composition Tables 2017 — every per-100 g calcium value in this guide, read from the minerals table.
• ICMR-NIN, A Brief Note on Nutrient Requirements for Indians — calcium RDA 2010 and 2020, and the EAR.
• ICMR-NIN, Dietary Guidelines for Indians 2024 — adolescent allowances, food-group averages, the model balanced diet, sunlight, salt, phytate and protein-powder guidance.
• FSSAI, Food Products Standards, Chapter 2.1: Dairy Products and Analogues — clause 2.1.13 on plain dahi and clause 2.1.2 on milk fat and solids-not-fat.
• USDA FoodData Central, record 171284, plain whole-milk yogurt — the independent cross-check on curd.
• Heaney RP, Weaver CM, Recker RR. Calcium absorbability from spinach. Am J Clin Nutr 1988;47:707-9
• Heaney RP, Weaver CM. Calcium absorption from kale. Am J Clin Nutr 1990;51:656-7
• Heaney RP, Weaver CM, Fitzsimmons ML. Soybean phytate content: effect on calcium absorption. Am J Clin Nutr 1991;53:745-7
• Heaney RP, Weaver CM, Fitzsimmons ML. Influence of calcium load on absorption fraction. J Bone Miner Res 1990;5:1135-8
• Pal R, Bhadada SK, Aggarwal A, Kaur A. Dietary calcium intake and association with serum calcium in healthy urban North Indian adults. Indian J Endocrinol Metab 2024;28:596-600
• Raj JP, et al. Dietary calcium intake and physical activity levels among people living in Karnataka. J Family Med Prim Care 2018;7:1411-16
• Baadkar SV, Mukherjee MS, Lele SS. A study on genetic test of lactase persistence in relation to milk consumption in regional groups of India. Genet Test Mol Biomarkers 2012;16:1413-18

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