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| THE WORLD SOCIALIST PARTY (INDIA) FOR A BETTER WORLD |
With 17% of the world’s population, India is home to a quarter of the world’s hungry. A population almost the size of Uttar Pradesh remains hungry every day.
The Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) of the United Nations, in its report titled, ‘The State of Food Security and Nutrition in the World, 2017’ depicted a grim picture — a staggering 190.7 million people or 14.5 per cent of the population is undernourished in India.
It is a tragic irony that India is the leading producer of milk with the largest buffalo population, the second largest producer of vegetables, fruits, and fish. Despite this, it has failed to vanquish hunger. Nearly one-third of adults in the country have a Body Mass Index (BMI) below normal just because they do not have enough food to eat.
Of all Indian children under five:
- one in three (35.7%) is underweight(low weight for age),
- one in three (38.4%) is stunted (low height for age);
- one in five (21%) is wasted(low weight for height) and
- only every second child exclusively breastfed for the first six months.
- 3,000 children die every day from poor diet-related illness;
- fewer than half of all Indian children start nursing within their first 24 hours, although breast-milk helps to protect infants against infection.
Overall, India accounts for more than three out of every 10 stunted children globally. This is largely owing to a lack of quality food, poor care and feeding practices and inadequate water, sanitation, and health services in the country. Most child deaths in India occur from treatable diseases like pneumonia, diarrhea, malaria and complications at birth. The child may eventually die of a disease, but that disease becomes lethal because the child is malnourished and unable to put up resistance to it
Development economist Jean Dreze argues that the most serious nutrition challenge in India is to reach out to children under three years of age: “It is well known that if a child is undernourished by age three, it is very difficult to repair the damage after that.”
The chronic impact of stunting on lifelong learning and adult productivity, in addition to increased disease susceptibility, is well known. Going by NFHS-4 results, it appears that 40% of India's future workforce will be unable to achieve their full physical and cognitive potential. Children stunted on account of malnutrition are estimated to go on to earn an average of 20% less as adults
Many children are born to anemic and malnourished teenage mothers. Indeed, 33.6% of Indian women are chronically undernourished and 55% are anaemic.
According to the India State-level Disease Burden Report and Technical Paper”, the disease burden due to malnutrition is responsible for 15 per cent of the total disease burden in 2016 and was 12 times higher than in China.
Some analysts estimate that 40% of the subsidized food never reaches the intended recipients.
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