Child nutrition needs attention

Child nutrition needs attention

The worsening of child nutrition in India calls for immediate and decisive course correction, while the nation is going to celebrate Seventy-Five years of its imposing democracy, the leading nutritionists have warned. The first phase of National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 that covered 17 states and five Union territories, released its report recently.

Key-findings of the report

The National Family Health Survey (NFHS) is a large-scale, multi-round survey conducted in a representative sample of households throughout India. The NFHS-5 captured data during 2014-19 and its content is similar to NFHS-4 (2015-16) to allow comparisons over time and also marks a shift from it.

The southern region once had India’s best child nutrition metrics. But in the past few years, the performance has plateaued. Stunting has risen in Kerala and Telangana, followed by just a minor decline in Andhra Pradesh and Karnataka. Also worth mentioning is the persistence of a huge rural-urban disparity in stunting in many states, notably in Meghalaya, Andhra Pradesh, Gujarat and Sikkim.

Overall, 10 out of 11 states in the Comprehensive National Nutrition Survey (2016-18) sample displayed a decline in underweight prevalence and 8 states showed fall in wasting. The worsening of child stunting in these states, thus, appears to be a rather sustained phenomenon.

Unlike the findings on the overweight category, where 10 out of 11 states registered an increase in this metric, only four states registered an increase in the number of underweight children. At least one aspect of child undernutrition has gone up in 14 out of 17 states. Additionally, both stunting and underweight increased in eight states, whereas stunting and wasting increased in six states.

What is Child Stunting?

Stunting is one of the most visible and prevalent forms of malnutrition. It refers to chronically low height-for-age among young children arising from poor nutrition, repeated infection, and inadequate psychosocial stimulation. Children are defined as stunted if their height-for-age is more than two standard deviations below the WHO Child Growth Standards median.

Stunting, more than any other factor, is likely to have long-lasting adverse effects on the cognitive and physical development of a child. Stunting occurs primarily due to inadequate diet; early and repeated infections are responsible for much of the rest.

Telangana, Gujarat, Kerala, Maharashtra, and West Bengal saw increased levels of child stunting. The reversals in child stunting are “hugely troubling” as normally, stunting levels do not increase because all the things that affect child growth tend to improve as stable democracies and economies move ahead.

Way forward

The alarming levels of malnutrition in India have hardly elicited a response from the country's food security machinery. The government machinery did not monitor the situation on time and therefore, continue to fail to take any meaningful remedial measures to contain the situation. A complacent approach that assumes that all necessary measures, including the Poshan Abhiyan, are in place and the reversal in progress is only momentary will be a sure way to inflict a debilitating, irreversible impact on children’s nutrition and their well-being. The nutritional status of our children reflects the health of our mothers and their ability to breastfeed. For this reason, malnutrition among children should be viewed as a pointer to an impending crisis in women’s health.