India has been lauded for its remarkable overall economic growth of over 8% over the last five years. But despite this high and relatively stable growth, India's underbelly is soft. The agriculture sector is performing below expectations, with growth rate of around 2.8%, it is way below the Eleventh Plan target of 4%. The Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that 22% of India's population is undernourished. Child malnutrition is...
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Low nutrition districts to be mapped for surveillance by Aarti Dhar
The Union Women and Child Development Ministry will map the high-risk and vulnerable districts to strengthen nutrition surveillance. It will also set up a working group for surveillance in health and nutrition at the Central level under the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) and the Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS). This follows a paper prepared by the Women and Child Development and Health and Family Welfare Ministries for addressing nutritional challenges...
More »Better baby care key to reducing deaths, reports UN health agency
Better care for babies during the first month after they are born is key to reducing child mortality rates in developing countries, the United Nations health agency said today, in an update on measures that are essential for the achievement of the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs). An estimated 40 per cent of deaths of children under the age of five occur in the first month of life, most in the...
More »Parental guidance by Abhijit Banerjee
A couple of years ago a colleague came into my office with what he thought was a definite typographic error: “It says that India won only three medals in the Olympics; that cannot be right — there is a billion people in India.” I had to break it to him that this was actually the most medals India ever won in a single Olympic game. India has an average of...
More »Failure from the jaws of success by Samir Garg
The efforts to reduce child malnutrition in Chhattisgarh have hit a roadblock. The state has partially rolled back its policy of decentralized food provisioning in the Integrated Child Development Services (icds), the key programme for reducing malnutrition amongst pre-school children. The National Family Health Survey (nfhs) shows that 47 per cent of children in Chhattisgarh are Underweight, putting it along with Madhya Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand and Meghalaya, among the top...
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