Malnutrition degrades India’s population

Press, 30 March 1983, Page 12

Malnutrition degrades India’s population

From “The Economist,” London

Malnutrition threatens to convert India into a land of biologically degraded human beings. Of the 23 million Indian babies born every year, 4 million die in childhood, 9 million suffer from serious physical and mental disabilities as a result of severe malnutrition, and another 7 million suffer lesser forms of malnutrition with less striking consequences, ?. Only 3 million become healthy adults. Thus barely 15 per cent of Indian children are able to achieve their full potential and India’s biggest asset, its manpower, is undermined from birth. The difficulty is that child malnutrition is largely invisible: no more than 2 per cent of cases exhibit obvious , external symptoms..ft.’; ■ • In a poor , sorfety. moit mothers of malnourished l ’ children ' think that their offspring are Tjormal. Deficiencies of protein, iren and otifc minerals, damage tw brain

and body metabolism from within, like a cancer. The poor' obtain their proteins from pulses, such as chick-peas and lentils. But pulses yield poor returns to farmers, and production now is no higher than it was in the early 1950 s although the population has virtually doubled. The availability of puses per head is down to 40 grammes against the recom- . ? mended minimum of 70 grammes and the optimum of 104. Pulses are grown mainly in rain-fed areas, and the moment irrigation is available farmers switch to more lucrative crops. The development of high-yielding varieties of pulses would make their cultivation more attractive, but so far no breakthrough has been made. Iron deficiency causes anaemia. This was once thought to be a problem mainly affecting women, nit studies by the nutrition institute show that it affects chiMren too. *.

In one large sample, 63 per cent of children under three and 45 per cent of children between three and five were anaemic. The symptoms are not dramatic and go largely unnoticed by parents. But iron deficiency can also affect brain development. Safe drinking water is not found even in cities, and water-borne diseases such as typhoid and hepatitis wreak their worst havoc on the malnourished. ? One survey in Bengal showed that, among children under five, girls had a 60 per cent higher incidence of third-degree malnutrition than boys. In almost all other countries, there are more women than men. In India, the ratio of females to males is 93.5 per cent, down from 97 per cent in 1901. In parts of northern India there was once a tradition of female infanticide; nowadays girls are allowed to die through neglect