It’s the grim statistic that just won’t budge: new child malnutrition numbers are out for India, and there is no good news to be had.
The exhaustive door-to-door survey covered a fifth of India’s children and found that 42.3 per cent of children under the age of five are underweight for their age, 58.8 per cent are stunted and 11.4 per cent are so severely underfed as to be considered “wasted.”
These figures are significant in part because some Indian nationalists reject the findings of international organizations that have warned that the child malnutrition situation is not improving even as the economy has grown at nearly 10 per cent per year over the last decade.
In fact, about as many Indian children are malnourished now as were at the beginning of the economic liberalization period two decades ago: the number has declined at best by two or three per cent.
One person who has refused to let the malnutrition figures get lost in the gloss of “India Shining” is Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, who chose to personally release this report and called the figures “a national shame,” saying “despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of undernutrition in the country is unacceptably high.”
Prime Minister Singh noted that the policy tools employed by government to date have not had the impact envisioned. The report findings suggest that the persistent problems of sclerotic bureaucracy and corruption continue to hamper those policy initiatives – for example, almost every village surveyed had an anganwadi community health centre. But while these are supposed to distribute dried rations to children in need, and feed those children cooked meals once a day, only half of the centres actually had the food supplies they were supposed to receive.
As the Globe reported in 2009, the reasons why India continues to have such high malnutrition rates have less to do with levels of poverty than they do with persistent social inequality, particularly between men and women.
The reason, according to research from the International Food Policy Research Institute, that many much poorer African nations nevertheless have better-nourished children than India does is that in those African states, women have much more autonomy in terms of personal mobility, work and household spending, and as a consequence, their children eat better. A child under five is almost twice as likely to be underweight in India as is a child in sub-Saharan Africa.
This survey also drew out the explicit connections between malnutrition and other aspects of development such as education and sanitation. It found that while nearly half of children of illiterate mothers are malnourished, only a third of children of mothers who had 10 or more years of education are.
The survey compared households in the best-performing districts of the most developed states with the worst districts in the poorest states; in the best districts, half of all mothers said their family members washed their hands with soap after they used the toilet, while only a fifth of mothers in the worst districts said they did so – even though almost all households said they had soap. Chronic diarrheal disease is a key cause of malnutrition.
