Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute claims India remains home to the world’s 42% underweight and 31% stunted children.
Days after the world saw India’s shining face at the gala opening of the Commonwealth Games, Washington-based International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) has exposed its ugly underbelly.
IFPRI’s global hunger index 2010 released on Monday claims the country remains home to the world’s 42% underweight and 31% stunted children. In fact, it accounts for a large share of the globe’s undernourished children.
The damning figures fly in the face of the government’s tall claims of progress and underline the failure of its numerous welfare programmes. Though the percentage of underweight children dropped from 60 to 44 between 1990 and 2008 and under-five mortality rate fell from 12% to 7%, India continues to have most underweight children in the world because of its one-billion-plus population.
In 2005-06, about 44% of Indian children under the age of five were underweight and 48% stunted.
In comparison, China reduced child malnutrition from 25% to 8% between 1990 and 2002 with a highly successful poverty alleviation plan, effective large-scale health, nutrition and family planning interventions and increased spend on water, sanitation and education.
The IFPRI report says almost a billion people went hungry this year globally, many of them children in Africa and Asia, due to poverty, conflict and political instability. Of the 122 countries in Asia and Africa, 25 have “alarming” levels and four “extremely alarming” levels of hunger.
On the global hunger index, India is ranked 67th (24.1 points), way below China (9th, 6 points), Sri Lanka (39th, 14.5 points), Pakistan (52nd, 19.1 points) and Nepal (56th, 20 points).
Only 84 countries were rated on the basis of three leading indicators — prevalence of child malnutrition, rate of child mortality and the proportion of calorie deficient people. Countries scoring less than 5 points were not rated.
India’s high index score was driven by high number of underweight children as a result of low nutritional and social status of women in the country, the report pointed out.
“The economic performance and hunger levels are inversely correlated. In South and Southeast Asia, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and Timor-Leste are among the countries with hunger levels considerably higher than their gross national income per capita,” it said.
The worldwide index improved by almost a quarter from 19.8 to 15.1 points, but hunger levels remained serious. The report said the number of hungry people had actually been increasing in recent years. In 2009, in the midst of a worldwide recession, the number of undernourished people surpassed one billion, although recent estimates by UN’s food and agriculture organisation suggest the number will have dropped to 925 million in 2010.
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