-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 Indian children are very short, on average, compared with children living in other countries. Because height reflects early life health and net nutrition, and because good early life health also helps brains to grow and capabilities to develop, widespread growth faltering is a human development disaster. Panagariya acknowledges these facts, but argues that Indian children are particularly short because they are genetically programmed to be so. In...

-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...

The poor man’s rich grain is getting richer – a new study published in the Journal of Nutrition shows that a variety of new pearl millet (more commonly known as bajra), which was conventionally bred to be 10% richer in iron helped iron-deficient children under the age of 3 years, to absorb enough of this crucial mineral to meet their physiological requirements. (See links below for full text and a...

-The Hindu Mumbai: On his trip to the Adivasi belt of Thane, teachers who got wind of journalist P. Sainath's (The Hindu's Rural Affairs Editor) visit approached him with a problem. "Could you please ask the government to provide twice the amount of mid-day meal on Monday? After the Friday afternoon meal, our children starve over the weekend. No teacher is willing to teach this bunch of kids whose bellies are...