46 per cent of India’s children malnourished

Millions of children in India are being sentenced to brain damage, poor education and early death as the booming country fails to tackle the malnutrition that affects almost half of its children, says a new report. In spite of the country’s economic growth, at least 46 per cent of its under three year-olds till suffer from malnutrition.

India is an “economic powerhouse but a nutritional weakling”, said the report by the British-based Institute of Development Studies (IDS) but still it is home to a third of the world's malnourished children, found a UK backed study. India is home to more than 230 million undernourished people and experts say about 3,000 babies and children in India die every day from malnutrition-related causes such as weak immune systems. India pledged in 2001 to meet the United Nations Millennium Development Goal of halving its number of hungry by 2015. China has already met its target.

But at its current rate of progress, India will not reach its goal until 2043, the IDS report found. In fact China is said to be two generations ahead of India in reducing hunger. We expect economic growth and improved nutrition to go hand-in-hand,” Lawrence Haddad, director of the IDS, told Reuters news agency. “But at the current rate, India will not reach the Millennium Development Goal," he said. And by failing to reach this target, “the Indian government is condemning a further generation to brain damage, poorer education and early death that result from malnutrition," he said. “It’s the contrast between India’s fantastic economic growth and its persistent malnutrition which is so shocking,” Lawrence Haddad, director of the IDS, told The Times newspaper.

The report highlights India’s failure to improve basic living standards for most Indians even while it its going through an unprecedented period of economic growth since the government came to power in 2004. In most developing countries, malnutrition drops in economic boom time, because parents earn more money and so can buy more and better food for their children, according to the report. One of the main problems, the report said was that millions of Indians were unable to hold government officials to account for delivering government feeding programmes, with bureaucrats frequently excluding large groups of individuals — including lower castes and women — from government initiatives. Another problem is that the country is against importing high-energy food supplements.

By Hayley Jarvis for SOS Children