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Resource centre on India's rural distress
 
 

If improvement is norm, it is important to be alert to patterns of stagnation in child nutrition indicators -Jean Dreze

-The Indian Express

Jean Dreze writes: Surjit Bhalla picks on data, but fails to debunk evidence of alarming trends in child nutrition.

I must thank Surjit Bhalla (‘Ideology trumps evidence’, IE December 26) for confirming the main point of an earlier article of mine (‘Give children weight’, IE December 17) — namely, that child undernutrition tends to be taken lightly in the corridors of power. His intention, of course, was the opposite — to debunk my article, along with a few others. But then, this is not Bhalla’s first self-goal.

For those who missed it, my article tried to draw attention to recent evidence, from the fifth National Family Health Survey (NFHS-5), of a stagnation in child nutrition indicators between 2015-16 and 2019-20. I also argued that these findings, along with related evidence of rising food insecurity in 2020, call for urgent intervention. Nothing in Bhalla’s rejoinder invalidates these concerns, and I also stand by all the facts mentioned in that article.

I share some of Bhalla’s reservations about the way NFHS-5 findings were reported in the media. But in his haste to knock down all suspects in one stroke, he gets entangled in a flawed attempt to dispute and downplay the evidence I had presented.

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