India's people are eating less now than they did two decades ago, even after record economic growth and bumper harvests. Food rots in warehouses stuffed with record crops. Politicians and
criminal gangs loot billions of dollars of food aid from the system.
The Indian budget for feeding children -- 4.4 cents for each per day -- have barely dented one of the world’s highest rates of child malnutrition. India has the highest percentage of malnourished children in the world except for East Timor, according to the 2012 annual Global Hunger Index. The report said 43.5 percent of Indian children are underweight. The dysfunction in India’s child food program, called Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), is just one example of how malnutrition ravages the country. More than three-quarters of the 1.2 billion population eats less than the minimum targets set by the government. The ratio has risen from about two-thirds in 1983.
India’s community of high net worth individuals is growing fast and, for them, the most favoured form of investment is gold. The HNI population in India rose by around 20.86% in 2010, and their wealth is estimated to have grown by more than 11%, to $530 billion. India is one of the fastest growing HNI segments in the world, currently contributing approximately 1.2% to the global HNI wealth. With an estimate that in the next five years, there would be about 219,000 such households, up from the current 62,000 households, their net worth is also expected to grow five times
The Indian budget for feeding children -- 4.4 cents for each per day -- have barely dented one of the world’s highest rates of child malnutrition. India has the highest percentage of malnourished children in the world except for East Timor, according to the 2012 annual Global Hunger Index. The report said 43.5 percent of Indian children are underweight. The dysfunction in India’s child food program, called Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), is just one example of how malnutrition ravages the country. More than three-quarters of the 1.2 billion population eats less than the minimum targets set by the government. The ratio has risen from about two-thirds in 1983.
India’s community of high net worth individuals is growing fast and, for them, the most favoured form of investment is gold. The HNI population in India rose by around 20.86% in 2010, and their wealth is estimated to have grown by more than 11%, to $530 billion. India is one of the fastest growing HNI segments in the world, currently contributing approximately 1.2% to the global HNI wealth. With an estimate that in the next five years, there would be about 219,000 such households, up from the current 62,000 households, their net worth is also expected to grow five times
India’s progress in fighting malnutrition fails to impress many experts. Save the Children and World Vision recently ranked India alongside Congo and Yemen at the bottom of a global nutrition barometer for its commitment and performance. While the nation frets constantly about whether economic growth and the stock market are up or down, the government has not collected data on child malnutrition since 2004 — something Purnima Menon of the International Food Policy Research Institute calls “mind-boggling.”...A.K. Shiva Kumar, an independent adviser to the government on development: “The problem of malnutrition is not visible or in-your-face,” he said. “The political attraction of working on nutrition is very low. It doesn’t really sell.”
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