-Economic and Political Weekly India has claims to many firsts, some on the wrong side; one being the highest proportion of malnourished children in the world, higher than several of the poorer Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries. Panagariya (2013) hypothesises that it is the flawed measurement methodology which is responsible for the reported high prevalence of Malnutrition in Indian children (p 98). He further avers that Indian children may never attain the...

-Economic and Political Weekly In his article, "Does India Really Suffer from Worse Child Malnutrition Than Sub-Saharan Africa?", Arvind Panagariya makes an impassioned case against accepting traditional measures that indicate that Indian children suffer from worse Malnutrition than their African counterparts. This phenomenon - that Indian children are more stunted despite the country's better performance on an array of other health and development indicators was dubbed the "South Asian Enigma" in...

-Economic and Political Weekly In his article Arvind Panagariya argues that (a) the prevailing narrative of child Malnutrition being worse in India "than nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries with lower per capita incomes" is false, (b) that this notion is an "artefact of a faulty methodology", and (c) that the nutrition situation and recent trends in India are not so bad anyway. Please click here to read the entire article. ...

-Economic and Political Weekly     Are Indian statistics on the extent of under-nutrition exaggerated and based on faulty yardsticks? Is there a case for moving away from the World Health Organisation standards? Can "genetics" really explain the low heights and weights among Indian children? Is it a puzzle and does it say something about the Indian estimates that Sub-Saharan Africa shows lower levels of under-nutrition than India though the former suffers...

-Economic and Political Weekly     In his paper Arvind Panagariya argues that the current World Health Organisation (WHO) recommended international growth standards exaggerate the extent of stunting in India. He points out that while the prevalence of stunting by current norms is higher in India than many poorer Sub-Saharan African countries, it has much lower mortality rates than them and a better record of economic growth. He deals his cards deftly, giving...