WUNRN
In many parts of rural India today
mothers do feed girl-children less than their sons. A UNICEF report shows
nine-month-old twins Devki and Rahul who were brought by their mother to the
Nutrition Rehabilitation Centre in Kolaras — in the Madhya Pradesh district of
India.
VIDEO - Click to Website Link and then scroll down to video reference and click Arrow in screen:
http://womennewsnetwork.net/2008/04/15/the-heavyweight-girls-of-manipur/
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Los
Angeles Times
Half
of young Indians are malnourished. In a nation seen as a rising power,
combating the problem 'has not been a policy priority . . . for the last 40
years,' a U.N. expert says.
By
Henry Chu
Los
Angeles Times Staff Writer
August 24, 2008
Anita Khemka / For The Times
Deep
Kumar, 20 months old, left, and 18-month-old Vishal are fed eggs by caretaker Nirmala
Devi at the UNICEF-sponsored nutrition rehabilitation center in Saraiya in the
impoverished eastern Indian state of
SARAIYA, INDIA — Sitting in the basket of a hanging scale, 20-month-old Deep
Kumar epitomizes the silent but monumental crisis gripping this country: The
needle stops at 14 pounds.
A healthy child his age ought to weigh nearly twice as much. But very little
about Deep is healthy. Whereas a normal toddler would run around, the boy seems
to struggle to keep his stunted frame sitting upright. His limbs are pitifully
thin, the bones within as fragile as glass.
These are classic signs of severe malnutrition, and they are branded on the
wasted bodies of millions of youngsters across India.
Astonishingly, an estimated 40% of all the world's severely malnourished
children younger than 5 live in this country, a dark stain on the record of a
nation that touts its high rate of economic growth and fancies itself a rising
power.
Soaring food prices and ineffectual government threaten to push that figure
even higher. Officials are beginning to wake up to the magnitude of the
emergency, as experts warn of grave consequences for the future of India's
economic boom if the state fails to improve the well-being of its youngest
citizens.
Already, the proportion of malnourished children is several times greater than
in China, Asia's other developing giant, and double the rate found in most
countries of sub-Saharan Africa.
"This is a stunning fact," said Abhijit Banerjee, a professor of
economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has studied the
problem.
To its credit, India has in the last several decades succeeded in warding off
the specter of famine that regularly haunted the subcontinent well into the
20th century. As a result of better farming techniques and food-security
policies, mass starvation is no longer the dread concern it once was.
But that achievement, as well as the recent euphoria over India's rapid
economic expansion, has obscured the government's failure to help provide its
people, particularly the young, with the nutrients needed to build healthy,
productive lives.
Many officials were shocked when a 2005-06 government study revealed hardly any
progress in reducing child malnutrition over the last decade and a half --
exactly when the Indian economy was exploding and attracting international
attention.
"This has not been a policy priority for this country for the last 40
years," said Victor M. Aguayo, chief of child nutrition and development at
the United Nations Children's Fund office in New Delhi. "There was an
underlying assumption that as soon as economic growth takes place, this will
vanish. So let's focus on economic growth; let's focus on getting rich."
Instead, India's performance in combating child malnutrition has been worse
than that of other countries with similar economic conditions. Close to half of
all young children in India -- or a staggering 60 million -- are malnourished.
Only Bangladesh and Nepal have a higher percentage of underweight children.
In a speech last year, Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh acknowledged the
gravity of the situation, calling it a "national shame."
"We cannot deny that it is a crisis," said Loveleen Kacker, a senior
official at the central Ministry for Women and Child Development. "Maybe
we didn't treat it like a crisis earlier, which we should have. Then we would
have taken corrective steps much earlier than now. And what we're thinking of
doing now we should've started 10 years back."
The World Bank estimates that malnutrition and its negative effects on health
and productivity cost India as much as 3% of GDP a year. Beyond the economic
fallout is the damage to India's image and credibility as it tries to assert
itself as an important player on the world stage.
"It's not nice to want to have an international role and then find that
you're having to defend such an indefensible position," Kacker said.
Just why malnutrition remains such a stubborn problem here is due to a
constellation of causes that tend to reinforce and aggravate each other,
creating "the perfect storm of risk factors," as Aguayo put it.
At root is the abject poverty so pervasive in India, where one-third of the
population of 1.1 billion squeaks by on less than $1 a day. Another third makes
do with $2 a day.
That deprivation can stack the cards against a child before he or she is even
born. Too many women here are underweight and undernourished themselves, the
major reason why 30% of Indian babies enter the world weighing less than 5 1/2
pounds. Afterward, in the crucial first two years of life, many children are
fed sugary water, animal milk, rice and other foods lacking the fat, protein
and vitamins necessary for proper physical and mental growth.
"Women too thin and anemic, giving birth to tiny babies, who are poorly
fed in the first two years of life: That's the synopsis of the tragedy,"
Aguayo said. "India needs to break this intergenerational cycle of
malnutrition."
That cycle is plainly evident with 20-month-old Deep and his mother, Bachiya
Devi, here in the dirt-poor eastern state of Bihar, where the proportion of
malnourished children younger than 3 has actually risen, not dropped, in recent
years, from 54% to 58%.
Like her son's, Devi's arms are stick-thin, the bangles adorning them sliding
up and down with no resistance. The sinews of her neck protrude, while her
chest seems lost far below the folds of her canary-yellow sari. Her careworn
face suggests an age much older than her 45 years.
With a blind husband who is unable to work, Devi depends on her parents to help
out with buying food. She reckons that 100 rupees a day would be enough to
guarantee two square meals for her husband, herself and the three of their five
children who live at home. But from her modest vegetable stall she earns an
average of 30 rupees a day, the equivalent of 70 cents.
"There are four or five days a month when the pot doesn't boil and we go
hungry," Devi said. At home, little Deep, her youngest child and only son,
eats one roti, or piece of flatbread, a day, plus some rice and
occasionally some vegetables.
"I'm a poor woman," Devi said.
"What more can I afford?"
As she spoke, her sleeping son twitched fitfully on a bed in a "nutrition
rehabilitation center" here in Saraiya sponsored by UNICEF, which in effect
provides triage for the worst-hit.
The ward is a study in cheated childhood. Mumta, at 22 months, looks less than
half her age; her rib cage can be easily felt beneath her clothes. Muskan, 1
1/2 , lies still under her mother's watchful gaze, a blue hand towel covering
nearly her entire body. Vikas, almost 4 and suffering from cerebral palsy, can
barely sit up without help from his gaunt mother, who is 45 and pregnant with
her fifth child.
There are flickers of hope. After 10 days of eating nutrient-laden eggs and
other foods not available at home, Deep has gained almost a pound and a bit
more energy. Other children in the ward also exhibit small signs of
improvement.
All the youngsters are so chronically malnourished that they belong to a
category known as "severely wasted." India is home to 8 million such
cases needing immediate therapeutic feeding and treatment.
However, the government accepts no foreign food aid and has not imported any of
the high-energy, ready-to-eat food packets on the market that can be
administered to badly malnourished youngsters to jump-start their recovery,
Aguayo said. None of the country's biotechnology firms -- among the most
advanced in the world -- manufactures them, though the cost would probably be
only about a dollar a pound.
These triage packets would help the worst-off cases. But if India fails to cut
its overall rate of child malnutrition, experts warn, it faces a future dragged
down by an underproductive workforce and ballooning numbers of malnourished
youngsters.
As Farhat Saiyed, a nutritionist here in Bihar state, put it: "We are
entering a dangerous world."
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