India’s Premier Manmohan Singh called malnutrition in the country “a national shame” on Tuesday as he released a major survey that found 42 percent of children under five were underweight.
“The problem of malnutrition is a matter of national shame,” Singh said at the launch of the HUNGaMA (Hunger and Malnutrition) Report, which surveyed 73,000 households across nine states. “Despite impressive growth in our GDP, the level of under-nutrition in the country is unacceptably high. We have also not succeeded in reducing this rate fast enough,” the 79-year-old prime minister added.
Singh said the findings of the report by an alliance of non-government organisations were both “worrying and encouraging” for India — a fast-growing country of 1.2 billion people with the highest number of children worldwide.
The research found the proportion of under-fives who are underweight had declined 11 percentage points in seven years, but Singh said it remained “unacceptably high” at 42 percent. “We cannot hope for a healthy future with a large number of malnourished children,” he said.
India’s economy has boomed in the last 20 years since a liberalisation wave began in 1991, with GDP growth rates of nearly 10 percent in the last decade helping to change perceptions of the country. Foreign companies and India’s powerful conglomerates have invested heavily, selling vast quantities of cars, luxury goods and Western lifestyle products to the growing middle classes. Rohini Mukherjee, from the Naadi Foundation, one of NGOs that produced the report, said the wealth created in a country estimated to have 57 billionaires last year had not trickled down fast enough to the impoverished masses.
Measured by the prevalence of malnutrition, India is “doing worse than sub-Saharan Africa,” she told AFP, echoing observations made by UN children’s agency UNICEF.
This is despite the world’s biggest government programme for early childhood development, called the Integrated Child Development Services Scheme, which is seen as riddled with corruption and inefficiency. Data from UNICEF shows that one in three malnourished children worldwide is found in India, with 47 percent of under-threes underweight.
The survey by Naandi and its partners was the “first of its kind” in its scope and methodology, Mukherjee said. The last government audit at a district level was carried out in 2004. One of the findings in the new research was that malnourished children in India were rarely hungry, merely badly fed due to widespread ignorance about nutrition among Indian parents.
