CB Bureau‘Children in India 2012’ – the report from the ministry of statistics and programme implementation – states that child malnutrition in India is severe and also a major underlying cause of child mortality. The findings point out that 48 per cent children under the age of five are stunted (too short for their age), which means half of the country’s children are chronically malnourished.
Acute malnutrition, as evidenced by wasting, results in a child being too thin for his or her height. The report finds that 19.8 per cent of children under five years in the country are wasted – in other words, one out of every five children in India is wasted.
The report says malnutrition is higher among children whose mothers are illiterate or have less than five years of education. The economic condition of the family is another factor that has a strong impact on the nutritional condition of children. The percentage of underweight children in the lowest wealth index category (56.6%) is nearly 3 times higher than that in the highest wealth index category (19.7%).
Overall, rural India is witnessing more malnutrition among children < 5 years, with a higher percentage of stunted, wasted and underweight children being reported from rural areas. The worst performing states with underweight children under five years of age are Madhya Pradesh (60 per cent), Jharkhand (56.5 per cent) and Bihar (55.9 per cent).
Various studies and surveys have been conducted to find out the root causes of child malnutrition. All these studies including the three National Family Health Surveys (NFHS) agree that the problem is multifaceted, the causes acting singly or in combination with other complex factors like poverty, purchasing power, health care, ignorance on nutrition and health education, female illiteracy, social convention, etc.
The Millennium Development Goal 1 of ‘eradicating extreme poverty and hunger’ has Target 2 asking to ‘halve, between 1990 and 2015, the proportion of people who suffer from hunger’, with the indicator ‘prevalence of underweight children under three years of age’. India is, therefore, committed to halving the prevalence of underweight children by 2015. However, the all-India trend of the proportion of underweight (severe and moderate) children below 3 years of age shows that the country is far from the finish line.
From the estimated 52 per cent in 1990, the proportion of underweight children below 3 years is required to be reduced to 26 per cent by 2015. Meanwhile, the proportion of underweight children has declined by only 3 percentage points during 1998-99 to 2005-06. At this rate of decline, the measure is expected to come down to only about 33 per cent by 2015.