Despite decades of nutrition programs, millions of Indian children remain malnourished, a tragic irony in one of the world’s fastest-growing economies
Vidhya Das
If stunting is related to hunger, then surely we are the hungriest country in the world, as India has the highest number of stunted children at 35 million. This number is especially painful when we consider that we have the third-highest number of billionaires and the fastest-growing economy.
India has had child health and nutrition programmes since the 1970s. The Balwadi Nutrition Programme (1970) provided rural children (aged 3–6) with about 300 kcal and 10 g of protein per child per day. This was soon absorbed into the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), launched in 1975, offering supplementary nutrition, preschool education, health check-ups, and nutrition counselling through the Anganwadies.
A series of Supreme Court rulings, beginning with the People’s Union for Civil Liberties (PUCL) Right to Food case (2001) made the Mid Day Meal Scheme and ICDS universal and non-negotiable entitlements. The Court affirmed the right to food under Article 21, directing governments to provide cooked school meals to all children aged 6–14 and supplementary nutrition through Anganwadies to children under 6 as well as pregnant and lactating mothers, with decentralised, community-based delivery.
Between 2005 and 2009, ICDS was expanded in phases to cover all habitations across India, eventually reaching universal coverage.
The Mid Day Meal Scheme, expanded in the mid-1990s and became universal in 2001 by Supreme Court orders, to ensure schoolchildren aged 6–14 received at least one hot, nutritious meal a day. Alongside these, the Public Distribution System (PDS), which subsequently became part of the National Food Security Act (2013), was intended to guarantee subsidised foodgrain for nearly two-thirds of India’s population.And yet child undernutrition and malnutrition persist. Public policy seeks to address this through further nutrition schemes and addressing micronutrient imbalances. The Poshan Abhiyan seeks to converge various nutrition-related schemes like Anganwadi Services and Pradhan Mantri Matru Vandana Yojana to create a synergistic impact. The primary focus is on improving the nutritional status of children (0-6 years), pregnant women, and lactating mothers.
The Poshan Tracker, a mobile-based application, is used to monitor the progress of the scheme and track key indicators. United Nations International Children’s Emergency Fund (UNICEF) India is a key implementing partner in this mission, providing technical support and advocating for its implementation. The program aims to reduce stunting, anemia, and other forms of undernutrition through a life cycle approach.
The question remains: how much undernutrition and malnutrition will these interventions address? A third of the children in this country and their parents and their siblings (many of whom would have gone beyond the zero-to-five age group and would not have been factored into the present calculations) just do not have access to adequate food!
Prof. Amartya Sen points out: “People have to go hungry if they do not have the means to buy enough food. Hunger is primarily a problem of general poverty … It is particularly critical to pay attention to employment opportunities … which influence people’s ability to buy food.”
And Utsa Patnaik, in The Republic of Hunger, argues: “Macroeconomic contraction and trade liberalisation have … led to severe employment decline, income decline and hence fall in aggregate demand for a large segment of the population—especially the rural population.”UNICEF’s life cycle approach to combat stunting and anemia is well-meaning. Such schemes have been cycled and re-cycled several times, but they often miss the ground reality: Families do not need another mobile-based tracker or a new project cycle; they need food on the table. people simply lack the means to buy enough food, as Prof. Sen reminds us. What would people do if they did not have the means to buy enough food, as Prof. Sen aptly points out? This will eventually happen when these schemes run out of their project period. And that is presuming that these schemes do provide enough food in the first place!!
Sometimes, I ask children in Agragamee School about what they had to eat before they came to school. Some children go completely silent. The others answered for them, ‘she did not eat anything. ’ Just about a year back, I was walking amongst rows of children gulping their Sev boondi after the August 15th flag hoisting. There were many children who had plastic bags with them.
I sat down beside one little girl, who was filling most of the treats into the bag, to ask why. I am taking this for my mother, as she asked me for some of the sweet boondi from the school! I quickly walk out, blinking back tears. Come monsoon, rural and tribal women are extremely stressed. There is little to eat, and they have to spend long hours in the cold and rain transplanting! The government PDS hardly lasts 10 to 15 days! Then again, it is just rice!
(The writer is with Agragamee. She advocates for Indigenous women’s rights. Views expressed are personal.)