Hunger kills as food grains rot

Despite quintals of food grains rotting in government godowns, almost half of the country’s children remain hungry.

A survey conducted in 112 districts, in nine states, has found that at least 42% of children, under the age of five years, are underweight and 59% stunted. Out of these, half are severely stunted and half are severely underweight by the age of two years.

Despite the government’s tall claims of progress, it seems the huge amount of money spent on the Anganwadi Centres under Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) has gone in the waste bin, prompting prime minister, Dr Manmohan Singh, to call malnutrition a matter of national shame. “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,” he said, while releasing the report. He added that the government could not rely solely on the ICDS to deal with it and there is need to focus on districts where malnutrition levels are high and where conditions causing malnutrition prevail.

However, he can take heart from the fact that the prevalence of child malnutrition has reduced from 53% to 42%, representing a 20.3% decrease over the last 7 years. In fact, the annual rate of reduction is almost 3%.

Prevalence of malnutrition is significantly higher among children from low-income families and children from Muslim or SC/ST households generally have worse indicators.

Birth weight remains an important risk-factor for child malnutrition. It was found that prevalence of underweight children, born with weight below 2.5 kg, was 50% and among children born with weight above 2.5 kg was 34%.

Mother’s education has a lot to do with malnutrition. It was revealed that 92% of mothers are not aware of the word malnutrition. Which is why the prevalence of underweight children among mothers who cannot read was 45% while that among mothers with 10 or more years of education was 27%.

Due to ignorance and family traditions, giving colostrum to the newborn and exclusive breastfeeding for first 6 months of a child’s life are not commonly practiced. Only 48.5% gave breast milk as the first intake to the new born and almost 51% of the mothers did not give colostrum to the newborn soon after birth and 58% fed water to their infants before six months.

In fact, 45.3% fed traditional food as the first intake after birth, as most of them were guided by family/traditional advice and some felt their milk was insufficient for the baby.

The survey was conducted by Nandi Foundation across 112 districts, including 100 focus districts of Bihar, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh. Tamil Nadu, Kerala and Himachal Pradesh were other surveyed states.