These may well be alarming statistics for a country with one of the youngest populations in the world. According to a National Family Health Survey, anaemia among children between six and 35 months had gone up from 74 per cent in 1998/99 to 79 per cent in 2005/06. The increase in the percentage from 20 per cent to 23 per cent during the same period of children under three years with 'wasting' (low weight for height) was also damning.
The situation is particularly alarming in Bihar, Madhya Pradesh, Uttar Pradesh, Haryana, Chhattisgarh, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka and Jharkhand where more than 70 per cent of the children in the age group of six to 59 months are anaemic.
Experts say malnutrition is a big worry for India, despite making good progress in reducing hunger. Says Prabhu Pingali, Professor, Cornell University, and Founding Director of Tata-Cornell Agriculture and Nutrition Initiative: "Much of the food policy is focused on staples and reducing hunger, and that's the way it has been since the 1940s. India has made good progress in reducing hunger. However, it has made little progress on reducing malnutrition. We still have problems of hidden hunger, micro-nutrients deficiencies, iron deficiencies, vitamin deficiencies. These have long-term consequences. For children, it can lead to stunting and anaemia. For adults, it can lead to poor nutrition outcomes - anaemia and low BMI for women."
Pingali argues that food security requires a very balanced food system. "Vegetables, pulses and lentils, which are so important for overall nutritional security, dont get the same attention as the staples." Instead, nutrition should be India's number one priority. A country with a growing young population should ensure healthy and productive people. "Even now when we talk about policies, we take a commodity-specific approach. If it's not rice and wheat, its pulses, but we do not think about the overall systems," he adds.
But to do so, the government is required to put in a system where farmers can respond to the demands of the market and enhance the productivity of the entire food system, instead of reacting to a crisis. We have to think about the long-term demand across all food commodities, and how we fulfil that. We should have broader sets of projections into the future and then look at the big gaps and develop policies around it, says Pingali.
Given our staple-focused mindset, considerable investment will have to be made in building awareness, making behavioural changes, and improving access to nutrition-rich food in order to feed a healthy productive population that can sustain economic growth over the long term.
