I want to initialize a variable with a value using awk

Question

I have code like this

for (( i=1; i<=$NUMBER_ROWS; i++ ))
do
    for (( j=1; j<=$NUMBER_COL; j++  ))
        do
            DATA=$(sed -n ${i}p $FILE | awk '{print $1}')
        done
done

In the "awk" tool I would like to insert the value from the second loop, but single quotes omit my variable when I do something like this | awk '{print $j}'

is there any way to do this?