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LATEST NEWS UPDATES | Malnutrition kills more Indians than any specific disease, yet successive governments pay scant -Rema Nagarajan

Malnutrition kills more Indians than any specific disease, yet successive governments pay scant -Rema Nagarajan

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published Published on Oct 25, 2017   modified Modified on Oct 25, 2017
-The Times of India

Malnutrition kills more Indians than any specific disease. That’s hardly surprising since a weakened body is more prone to infections and responds less to medicine or treatment than a well-fed, healthy one.

Widespread malnutrition has been termed a national shame and a top priority. Yet, the debate in governments is mostly about whether or not to give packaged food and whether deficiencies of vitamins and minerals should be addressed by fortifying food or by distributing micronutrient powders. It is rarely about the chronic hunger of millions despite the country’s much-touted economic growth. This focus is pushed by the food industry eyeing the huge ‘bottom of the pyramid’ market, where people are too poor to be meaningful consumers unless governments buy on their behalf.

It would be laughable, if it was not so tragic, that governments talk about supplements and packaged food when people are eating too little nutritious food, as household consumption expenditure data shows. A shocking 80% of rural people and 70% of urban folks don’t get the stipulated 2,400 kcal per day, leave alone sufficient vegetables, fruits, eggs, milk products, fish and meat. There is, of course, no food scarcity, unlike in places affected by civil war or natural calamities. Recall the yearly boast of bumper harvests.

Governments eagerly grab at ‘technical fixes’ like new vaccines or programmes for non-communicable diseases (NCDs). Both are needed, but why the reluctance to engage with the more complex problem of ensuring people can get nutritious food? Could it be because the technical fixes have powerful backers – vaccine manufacturers for expanded immunisation programmes, hospitals and drug makers for more government funds to treat NCDs among those who can’t afford the rapidly escalating cost of private healthcare?

Besides poverty alleviation measures, government efforts include interventions like the public distribution system. Increasingly, these are targeted narrowly at the ‘poor’, officially just 24% of the population, ignoring the fact that the malnourished are more numerous – according to the 2015-16 National Family Health Survey-4, barely 10% of children below two years have an adequate diet, nearly 40% of those under five are stunted and over 35% underweight. Clearly, many more than the officially poor urgently need such interventions.

Successive governments have failed to effectively implement the two largest programmes for addressing malnutrition, the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) to provide nutritional diets to infants, pregnant and nursing mothers, and the Midday Meal Scheme to provide 13 crore schoolchildren hot cooked meals. These are underfunded and depend on millions of contractual workers, mostly women.

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The Times of India, 24 October, 2017, https://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/staying-alive/malnutrition-kills-more-indians-than-any-specific-disease-yet-successive-governments-pay-scant-attention/


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