Sujalam, Suphalam*…and yet…
Here is a grim and sad reminder of Bharat’s under-development and how poor governance, bad policies and corruption have conspired to turn a land praised by Bankim Chandra as “सà¥à¤œà¤²à¤¾à¤‚ सà¥à¤«à¤²à¤¾à¤‚...”into a country with “alarming” levels of hunger. 🙁
Courtesy IFPRI, “The Challenge of Hunger 2008” (via BBC) which has the following depressing statistics about hunger in India:
- India ranks 66 out of 88 countries on the 2008 Global Hunger Index (GHI).
- India is home to the world’s largest food insecure population, with more than 200 million people who are hungry.
- All Indian states have at least a “serious†level of hunger; there is not a single state with low or even moderate levels.
- Twelve states fall into the “alarming†category and one (Madhya Pradesh) is considered to have an “extremely alarming†level of hunger.
As the report notes, economic development has not necessarily translated into lower hunger levels and reduction in malnutrition:
…the report identified that strong economic growth does not necessarily translate into lower hunger levels. Even states with high rates of economic growth in recent years, such as Gujarat, Chhattisgarh, and Maharashtra, have high levels of hunger, while states with relatively slower economic growth, such as Punjab, achieved a lower hunger level.
As you sit down to have your meal today, please spare a moment’s thought for these unfortunate millions…and please think how we can alleviate at least some of their pain and misery.
Here is the sobering Hunger Map, courtesy IFPRI:
You can download the full report here (413k).
* From “Vande Mataram”. Roughly translated as “…(You are blessed with) Richness in water resources, plenty of fruits (and forest resources)”; also “…Rich with thy hurrying streams, bright with orchard gleams…”
Adjacent Posts:
Seems India not shinning is not restricted to BJO alone.
Excerpts from As Indian Growth Soars, Child Hunger Persists* by Somini Sengupta
* Caution: Original article has some shocking images.
Hat Tip: Sanjay
From Sure, Mr PM, we’re shamed by malnutrition. But are you?, a short excerpt:
If millions of Indian children are still malnourished, if many millions more live in abject poverty, it is a commentary on the poverty of policy-making in India in the 60-plus years since independence. It’s not that taxpayers’ money has not been spent over the decades on poverty alleviation measures and providing subsidised food: it’s that throwing money around has become a substitute for effective policy that works.
It is a perversion that India, which has more per-capita arable land than China and produces as much grains and milk as the world’s biggest farming nations, is still home to the world’s largest population of malnourished people.
Right from the time of Jawaharlal Nehru, who in 1947 called for “the ending of poverty and ignorance and disease and inequality of opportunityâ€, every Five Year Plan has paid token lip service to the poor and the marginalised, yet their absolute numbers have only increased over the years. Instead of informed policy, the poor were given political slogans: garibi hatao – and a limitless array of schemes named after dead Congress leaders.
The famed economist Dr Raja Chelliah, whom Manmohan Singh was fond of quoting in the 1990s, noted that India’s continuing poverty was the result of a failure of public policy.
He argued that the major fault of India’s economic policy was that it was largely based on “democratic socialist thought†– which invested the government with the greatest responsibilities but without the appropriate policy mechanisms to respond to the challenges.
Dr Chelliah also faulted politicians who gave in to “competitive populism†and focused on short-term political gains instead of long-term poverty alleviation programmes. It’s a fair bet that were he alive today, he would have had much to say about the Manmohan Singh government’s record of throwing good money into flawed welfare programmes that won’t deliver.
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And what do you plan to do about it, beyond guilt-tripping us into coughing up more taxes while your government pushes through with extravagant welfare schemes that won’t address the problem but will only bust the bank?
the slogan for politicians will always be ‘garibi hatao’.
Might the data on malnourishment among children in India based on wrong assumptions and flawed methodology?
From Is India as Malnourished as Data Suggest?:
Arvind Panagariya, a professor of public and international affairs at Columbia University and well-known India commentator, has questioned accepting the results of such studies at face value. Mr. Panagariya told India Real Time the reasons for his skepticism of the conventional narrative. According to him, in the state of Kerala, which exhibits social indicators close to developed country standards and almost as high as China’s, 25% of children are apparently stunted, whereas in, for example, Senegal, which is much poorer and fares worse in just about any social indicator, the figure is 20%. Likewise, he asks, how plausible is it that 37% of children in Punjab, “the breadbasket and the dairy of India,†are stunted?
Here’s the crux: all these studies rest on one crucial assumption, the World Health Organization’s norm for measuring child malnutrition, called the “Child Growth Standard.†This is based on a sample or “reference population†of 8,440 healthy young children (0-60 months) from Brazil, Ghana, Oman, Norway, India and the U.S. The idea behind the index is that no matter where children are born, they should be able to grow equally well if they’re adequately nourished regardless of genetics or ethnicity.
The WHO norm assumes that the bottom 2.14% is malnourished (or stunted) and the rest are normal. All comparisons of whether a child is malnourished in India or anywhere else is made against this reference group of well-nourished kids and this cut-off.
The 2.14% cut-off is hard to argue with. It corresponds to two “standard deviations†(a measure of the spread of data) below the median (the midpoint, whereby 50% lies above and 50% lies below), assuming a “normal†or bell-shaped distribution. The bottom line is that this is a standard assumption in statistics.
But how about the selection of the reference population?
Mr. Panagariya suggests that the only plausible explanation for the wide discrepancy between India’s performance on malnutrition and stunting measures and its overall socio-economic performance is that “at any given age sub-Saharan African children and those defining WHO reference population are on average genetically taller and weigh more than Indian children.†In other words, a child who is in fact healthy is being measured as stunted or malnourished simply because he or she is likely to be smaller than the norms of the reference population. Indeed, as Mr. Panagariya points out, even most rich Indian kids would be considered malnourished or stunted by this metric.
The underlying problem is that imputing malnutrition or stunting by using a cut-off defined for an external reference group is making an inference based on an assumption, not on direct observation. In contrast, statistics on, say, infant mortality or life expectancy can be more or less directly measured, as can conventional economic statistics.
Mr. Panagariya’s hypothesis is an important and provocative one that bears further investigation and careful scrutiny. If it is validated by future research, things might not be as bleak as the numbers suggest.
Screeching headlines may grab eyeballs but what’s really needed is a deeper dig into the puzzle.
Do read: Poor In India Starve As Politicians Steal $14.5 Billion Of Food
By Mehul Srivastava and Andrew MacAskill – Aug 29, 2012
From Does India Really Suffer from Worse Child Malnutrition Than Sub-Saharan Africa?, Vol – XLVIII No. 18, May 04, 2013 | Arvind Panagariya
A common continuing criticism of the economic reforms in India has been that despite accelerated growth and all-around poverty reduction, the country continues to suffer from worse child malnutrition than nearly all Sub-Saharan African countries with lower per capita incomes. This paper argues that this narrative, nearly universally accepted around the world, is false. It is the artefact of a faulty methodology that the World Health Organisation has pushed and the United Nations has supported. If appropriate corrections are applied, in all likelihood, India will be found to be ahead of Sub-Saharan Africa in child malnutrition, just as in other vital health indicators.
Pl download the pdf file here
From Think sanitation, not food security
by Pavan Srinath — May 24, 2013
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…Malnutrition is a condition where certain basic nutrients are lacking in the human body, leading to poor health and physical development. The mistake has been in assuming that this is because people do not have enough food to eat. Nutrition is not just about what people eat – but about how well the body is able to utilise it. Could it be, that people are losing their health, not because of the lack of food but because of recurring bouts of dysentery, diarrhoea and an infection from a host of parasites? Could the problem here be a lack of sanitation and not food insecurity? Could the problem have been fundamentally misdiagnosed?
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When posed with a symptom, doctors perform a differential diagnosis. The question to ask is: what causes this malnutrition? Is it because of a lack of food intake (or availability), or because of unclean drinking water and open defecation? The latter is particularly hard to measure, because people are affected not only if they defecate in the open – but also if their neighbours do so. New research from Dean Spears of Princeton University shows that open defecation (and a lack of basic sanitation) explains a majority of variation in child height across all countries in the world – as opposed to food availability, income, literacy or any other reason. Spears provides evidence that consistently shows the high negative impact of open defecation on child height and malnutrition, across countries, within India and when controlled for factors like GDP.
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While the National Food Security Bill proponents have been looking at nutrition as a ‘gross’ problem which requires more input in the form of cheaper food, the reality is that it is largely a ‘net’ problem. Far too much nutrition is lost to recurring diarrhoea, dysentery, persistent worm infestations and chronic environmental enteropathy linked to open defecation and a lack of sanitation. People in 69 percent of rural Indian households continue to defecate in the open. While most of the urban population uses toilets, little human waste gets collected and treated properly.
It is ludicrous that sanitation has not been made a priority in development policies addressing malnutrition. While the official government of India position has always been that malnutrition is ‘complex, multidimensional and inter-generational’, the interventions have largely been about targeted and non-targeted nutritional interventions, subsidized healthcare, and with token mention of clean drinking water supply and sanitation. This is like giving dysentery patients subsidized food and medicine, and asking them to eat more, and stopping the medical advice there. In the absence of focus on sanitation, what we have is taxpayer-funded diarrhea and little else.
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Not only does the Food Security Bill show poor economic reasoning, and flawed policy design, it is also treating the wrong problem. What national policies need to focus on are rural and urban sanitation along with the provision of clean drinking water. Not on quaint notions of food security.
More on the link between sanitation and malnutrition…From Poor Sanitation in India May Afflict Well-Fed Children With Malnutrition
By GARDINER HARRIS, JULY 13, 2014:
…New research on malnutrition, which leads to childhood stunting, suggests that a root cause may be an abundance of human waste polluting soil and water, rather than a scarcity of food.
…Now, Unicef officials and those from other major charitable organizations said in interviews that they believe that poor sanitation may cause more than half of the world’s stunting problems.
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This research has quietly swept through many of the world’s nutrition and donor organizations in part because it resolves a great mystery: Why are Indian children so much more malnourished than their poorer counterparts in sub-Saharan Africa?
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This disconnect between wealth and malnutrition is so striking that economists have concluded that economic growth does almost nothing to reduce malnutrition.
Half of India’s population, or at least 620 million people, defecate outdoors. And while this share has declined slightly in the past decade, an analysis of census data shows that rapid population growth has meant that most Indians are being exposed to more human waste than ever before.
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“The difference in average height between Indian and African children can be explained entirely by differing concentrations of open defecation,†said Dean Spears, an economist at the Delhi School of Economics. “There are far more people defecating outside in India more closely to one another’s children and homes than there are in Africa or anywhere else in the world.â€
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India is an increasingly risky place to raise children. The country’s sanitation and air quality are among the worst in the world. Parasitic diseases and infections like tuberculosis, often linked with poor sanitation, are most common in India. More than one in four newborn deaths occur in India.
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India now spends about $26 billion annually on food and jobs programs, and less than $400 million on improving sanitation — a ratio of more than 60 to 1.
“We need to reverse that ratio entirely,†Dr. Laxminarayan said.
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No Indian city has a comprehensive waste treatment system, and most Indian rivers are open sewers as a result. But Varanasi, India’s oldest and holiest city, is so awash in human waste that its decrepit condition became a national issue in recent elections. The city’s sewage plants can handle only about 20 percent of the sewage generated in the city, said Ramesh Chopra of Ganga Seva Abhiyanam, a trust for cleaning the river. The rest sloshes into the Ganges or fetid ponds and pits.