An estimated 40 % of the world’s severely malnourished children under 5 live in India
Malnutrition is not just a surface problem, or a disease that goes away. Research shows that it can potentially impede sensory, cognitive and social development. This means malnutrition in childhood not only suffer as young babies but are less likely to benefit from schooling and other social development in the long run resulting in them potentially being low income adults, thus making malnutrition a vicious cycle.
The facts are very disturbing:
- Over 47% of India’s children below the age of three years are malnourished (and underweight). The World Bank states this as 60 million out of a global estimated total of 146 million
Source-Unicef statistics
At this point, while we have multiple shining India campaigns, it is also important to see where our bubbles lie. The common myths are:
- Indian children are better nourished than most African children
- India’s low per-capita income is the major underlying cause
- International growth standards to assess malnutrition skew the results
While poverty and low income are indeed the reasons, but there is a huge gap in policy making, planning and implementation which also needs sufficient highlighting.
- Funding – Children form ~30% of India’s billion- plus population while 4.86% is what the Union Budget allocates them, according to the Women’s Feature Service, and out of which, 70% is allocated for education, and only 11% for health
- Information flows on malnutrition in the medical community – Especially in programmes like the National Rural Health Mission little emphasis has been given to malnutrition. The teaching of malnutrition is seen as largely inadequate in medical and nursing schools. The doctors and nurses largely delegate these issues to others
- Early marriage and underweight births – Self explanatory really!
- Child Labour- This is a whole post in itself
Through MIEF’s field work, we have also realised that malnutrition is not a rural-only or a poor-person only problem. People who are reading this post on the Blog or Facebook or Twitter and have access to technologies and are not necessarily low-income adults/ families, may still need higher levels of health awareness. We wanted to share the gravity of the issue here. We believe, the first step towards a solution generally begins with the understanding of the problem.
Disclaimer: The sources for the figures are from multiple worldwide agencies as mentioned and are not provided by MIEF which does not hold any copyright or expertise on the actual numbers. MIEF is sharing all the data with its readers with a belief that the first step is being aware.
More reading: Child malnutrition in India:Why does it persist? , Statistics For India , Statistics on Hunger