Why India makes a poor job of feeding the young, and how it could do better.
Source: THE ECONOMIST | GOTHEKAR PADA
VISHAL, the son of a farm labourer in the west Indian state of Maharashtra, is almost four. He should weigh around 16kg (35lb). But scooping him up from the floor costs his nursery teacher, a frail woman in a faded sari, little effort. She slips Vishal’s scrawny legs through two holes cut in the corners of a cloth sack, which she hooks to a weighing scale. The needle stops at just over 10kg—what a healthily plump one-year-old should weigh.
The teacher nods and puts Vishal back on the floor, where he sits listlessly before a jigsaw puzzle. That his teacher does not look perturbed is unsurprising. Nearly half of India’s small children are malnourished: one of the highest rates of underweight children in the world, higher than most countries in sub-Saharan Africa. More than one-third of the world’s 150m malnourished under-fives live in India.
That makes the sight of small, skinny children depressingly routine. Vishal’s rural village is not especially impoverished; 120km (75 miles) from Mumbai, India’s financial centre, it offers factory-work as well as the farm labour most country people do. But the battered register in Vishal’s nursery, a government-run centre known as an anganwadi (literally, courtyard), shows that close to half the children are malnourished, a handful chronically so. “It’s always been this way,” says Sunanda, the anganwadi teacher, who has weighed the children in her care every month for 25 years. “Nothing has changed.”
Speak Your Mind