Children malnourishment-A policy failure! part-III
Most of the child deaths, especially in the rural areas, go unreported or unrecorded. Education and maternal development programmes in India work, but what is lacking is the desire to implement the policies and the honest will to develop the society.
IT IS clearly stated in the NFHS fact sheets that the most vulnerable groups are the women in the reproductive age group and young children. It is well established that 80% of a child's mental and physical growth takes place in the first two years after birth. Most of the child deaths, especially in the rural areas, go unreported or unrecorded. Education and maternal development programmes in India work, but what is lacking is the desire to implement the policies and the honest will to develop the society. It is the inefficiency of our media (under the DAVP and central government unit) being unable to telecast adequate social advertisements to attract and generate the interest of the viewers and thus unable to enlighten them. The ads that are generally broadcast on electronic medium are rather dry or have less face value in the market.
Even there is either no or less mention about the celebrity endorsement of such ads. Able political leadership (region and audience targeted) and right public guidance is needed to arouse the curiosity of the left out masses.
India’s prevalent rate of under-nutrition in the discussed age group continues to remain one of the highest in the world. Good nutrition in early stages of life remains the key input for human capital formation, a fundamental factor for sustainable and equitable economic growth. It is in this context that the organisations committed to child rights and development has to bring this issue centre- stage in their ongoing development work in India.
For the last twenty years the government has been running the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) which now covers 400,000 of India's 600,000 odd villages and is meant for children under six years of age. Taking advantage of food surpluses the government in recent years introduced a mid-day meal scheme for all school-going children.
The primary responsibility for ensuring the implementation of the central government's food schemes rests with the State Government. In order to ensure cumulative food security, a per capita availability of 215 kg/ person/ year of food grains need to be attained. Also emphasis on women’s employment and education, particularly nutrition and health education, should provide the bedrock of the nation’s nutritional intervention.
Stunting, a chronic restriction of growth in height indicated by low height-for-age; and wasting, an acute weight loss indicated by low weight-for-height and less visible micronutrient deficiencies. NFHS-3 found that 63 per cent of urban children were anaemic, 56 per cent children in the wealthiest households were anaemic and similarly 55 per cent children of mothers who had more than 12 years of education were also anaemic. Child under- nourishment is a human rights issue. Implementation of right programmes will take decades if progress persists at turtle pace.
The fundamental problem that India is confronted with is the persistence of high levels of child malnutrition, which can be measured using three indicators: underweight, reflecting in low weight for age;
According to Noble Prize laureate Amartya Sen, who wrote in The Little Magazine, Hunger: Old torments and new blunders, in 1998, stocks of central food grains reserves were around 18 million tonnes — close to the official "buffer stock" norms needed to take care of possible fluctuations of production and supply. Since then, it has climbed and climbed, firmly surpassing the 50 million mark and it appears, according to recent reports that our stocks now amount to 62 million tonnes. To take Jean Drèze’s graphic description, if all the sacks of grain were laid up in a row, this would stretch more than a million kilometres, taking us to the moon and back. Since Jean Drèze wrote this a decade back, the stocks have risen some more, and the sacks would now take us to the moon and back to the earth, and then back to the moon again.
Child malnutrition is a gender issue too in India because it is mostly related to women. Considering the malnutrition among girl child is what experts call the ''Integrational Cycle of Transmission of Malnutrition,'' which begins with a malnourished girl child who grows up to become an unhealthy mother. Generally as examined are six major types of care behaviours: feeding and breast-feeding, food preparation and hand handling, hygiene behaviour, psychosocial care, care for women, and home health practices. Out of these practices of the breast feeding and food preparation, these are taken well care of by local area nurses and doctors. But lack of awareness about the adequate nutritional information and uneducated mothers, brings the concrete efforts of the government back to square one from which it proceeded. On calculation, it was reported that about15.7 per cent of women with12+ years of education, weighed less than 2.5 kg at birth of a child when compared the corresponding figure was as high as 26.2 for women with no education. Similarly on assessing the basic vaccination received by the children of educated mothers the scale varied from 75.2 per cent to only 26.1 per cent children of mothers with no education. Nutritional anaemia is a major micro-nutrient deficiency in India among mothers. It is estimated that this Iron deficiency is to affect over fifty per cent of pregnant and lactating mothers across India and could be responsible for 20 per cent of maternal deaths which is a matter of grave concern for growing healthy India.
India’s prevalent rate of under-nutrition in the discussed age group continues to remain one of the highest in the world. Good nutrition in early stages of life remains the key input for human capital formation, a fundamental factor for sustainable and equitable economic growth. It is in this context that the organisations committed to child rights and development has to bring this issue centre- stage in their ongoing development work in India.
For the last twenty years the government has been running the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS) which now covers 400,000 of India's 600,000 odd villages and is meant for children under six years of age. Taking advantage of food surpluses the government in recent years introduced a mid-day meal scheme for all school-going children.
The primary responsibility for ensuring the implementation of the central government's food schemes rests with the State Government. In order to ensure cumulative food security, a per capita availability of 215 kg/ person/ year of food grains need to be attained. Also emphasis on women’s employment and education, particularly nutrition and health education, should provide the bedrock of the nation’s nutritional intervention.
Stunting, a chronic restriction of growth in height indicated by low height-for-age; and wasting, an acute weight loss indicated by low weight-for-height and less visible micronutrient deficiencies. NFHS-3 found that 63 per cent of urban children were anaemic, 56 per cent children in the wealthiest households were anaemic and similarly 55 per cent children of mothers who had more than 12 years of education were also anaemic. Child under- nourishment is a human rights issue. Implementation of right programmes will take decades if progress persists at turtle pace.
The fundamental problem that India is confronted with is the persistence of high levels of child malnutrition, which can be measured using three indicators: underweight, reflecting in low weight for age;
According to Noble Prize laureate Amartya Sen, who wrote in The Little Magazine, Hunger: Old torments and new blunders, in 1998, stocks of central food grains reserves were around 18 million tonnes — close to the official "buffer stock" norms needed to take care of possible fluctuations of production and supply. Since then, it has climbed and climbed, firmly surpassing the 50 million mark and it appears, according to recent reports that our stocks now amount to 62 million tonnes. To take Jean Drèze’s graphic description, if all the sacks of grain were laid up in a row, this would stretch more than a million kilometres, taking us to the moon and back. Since Jean Drèze wrote this a decade back, the stocks have risen some more, and the sacks would now take us to the moon and back to the earth, and then back to the moon again.
Child malnutrition is a gender issue too in India because it is mostly related to women. Considering the malnutrition among girl child is what experts call the ''Integrational Cycle of Transmission of Malnutrition,'' which begins with a malnourished girl child who grows up to become an unhealthy mother. Generally as examined are six major types of care behaviours: feeding and breast-feeding, food preparation and hand handling, hygiene behaviour, psychosocial care, care for women, and home health practices. Out of these practices of the breast feeding and food preparation, these are taken well care of by local area nurses and doctors. But lack of awareness about the adequate nutritional information and uneducated mothers, brings the concrete efforts of the government back to square one from which it proceeded. On calculation, it was reported that about15.7 per cent of women with12+ years of education, weighed less than 2.5 kg at birth of a child when compared the corresponding figure was as high as 26.2 for women with no education. Similarly on assessing the basic vaccination received by the children of educated mothers the scale varied from 75.2 per cent to only 26.1 per cent children of mothers with no education. Nutritional anaemia is a major micro-nutrient deficiency in India among mothers. It is estimated that this Iron deficiency is to affect over fifty per cent of pregnant and lactating mothers across India and could be responsible for 20 per cent of maternal deaths which is a matter of grave concern for growing healthy India.
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