Under-nutrition in India: dual nutrition burden in children
India faced both the problems of acute and chronic under-nutrition at the time of Independence. Recognizing the importance of nutrition for health and human development, the country adopted multi-sectoral, multi-pronged strategy to combat under-nutrition. Consequently, self-sufficiency in food production was achieved and buffer stocks were built up. Food for work for out of work poor persons and public distribution of food items providing subsidized food grains were operationalised to provide food security to the poor. Recognizing the vulnerability of children special efforts were made to bridge the gap in energy requirement of children through food supplementation, integrated child development scheme and mid-day meals schemes.
Improved access to health care reduced the nutritional toll due to infections. While these interventions resulted in some improvement in nutritional status of children but the pace of improvement remained slow. In the last five decades, while the mortality rate has come down by 50 percent and the fertility rate by 40 percent the reduction in under nutrition in children is only 20 percent. There is a growing concern that increase in outlays in nutrition sector has not been translated into improvement in outputs like improvement in quality and converge or nutritional status.
The presentation have also reveled that persisting of the dual nutritional problems prevails in across all states but the situations are worst in the northern part of India particlurly in Rajasthan, M.P. U.P. Bihar and Orissa. Further, the study also points out that the state like Haryana, Punjab, Maharastra and Delhi which are economically better performing states shows the worrisome picture of the continuing under-nutrition among children in these states. And also the widening social disparities in these states in respect to children nutrition concerned.
Dr. Perma suggest that the utmost need of public concern to be to focuses on the challenges of dual nutrition burden turned into opportunity to improve the nutrition and health status of children. The presentation was arranged by the Council for Social Development (New Delhi) in part of their seminar series “Discourses in Development” which aimed to highlight innovative research and thinking on issues related to social development and explore alternative paradigms of development in a multidisciplinary forum.
Source: S. Venkatesan