Uttar Pradesh, a vast state of 200 million people, a slight majority of children under age 5 in this state are stunted — worse than in any country in अफ्रीका save Burundi
The greatest cost of stunting isn’t stature but brain power. Repeated studies have found that malnutrition early in life reduces intelligence in ways that can never be regained. The brains of stunted children don’t develop properly — you see the difference in brain scans — which is perhaps why stunted children on average drop out of school early.
“We’re not focused on stunting because we fear kids will be too short,” said Shawn Baker, a nutrition expert at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, who accompanied me on visits to rural areas here. “We’re focused on stunting because it’s a proxy for cognitive development, and because kids are at risk of dying.”
The win-a-trip journey is a chance to spotlight issues that aren’t sexy but matter most. And when hundreds of millions of children are unnecessarily malnourished, holding them back all their lives, that should be a global priority.
Now a couple of bold new theories are emerging to explain why India does so poorly in child nutrition.
The first is that the low status of women leads to maternal nutrition in India that is much worse than previously believed. Women often eat last in Indian households — and 42 percent of Indian women are underweight before pregnancy, according to Diane Coffey, a Princeton University economist. Then during pregnancy, Indian women gain only half the recommended weight.
“The average woman in India ends pregnancy weighing less than the average woman in sub-Saharan अफ्रीका begins pregnancy,” Coffey writes in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The upshot is that many children are malnourished in the uterus and never recover.
One woman we met, Sahliha Bano, is a villager with an 11-month-old girl named Munni, who is acutely malnourished. The family doesn’t have a toilet (few in the village do).
Bano herself reflected other factors sometimes associated with malnutrition. She is illiterate and was married at about 14, and Munni is her sixth child. Bano rejects birth control because she believes it is against God’s wishes.
These are complex issues, but if Afghanistan and Bangladesh can make great progress (along with Indian states like Kerala), so can all of India. Manmohan Singh, India’s former prime minister, called child malnutrition “a national shame” — but there’s still no political will to address it.
Instead, in a political move to win support from religious groups that object to eating fertilized eggs, the state of Madhya Pradesh recently rejected the idea of serving eggs in child-feeding programs. The result will be more children added to the hundreds of millions held back unnecessarily for the rest of their lives — as a great nation weakens itself.
https://archive.is/WnPlO
