India houses 24% of world's malnourished; 30% of stunted children under 5

India has shown improvement in reducing child stunting but with 46.6 million stunted children, the country is home to over 30.9% of all stunted children under five--the highest in the world.

Increased food security and access has led to fewer malnourished and anaemic Indians in 2017 than in the preceding decade, but India needs to do much more to meet its nutrition goals, the 2018 Global Nutrition Report (GNR 2018) has shown.

India is not on track to achieve any of the World Health Organization’s (WHO) nine nutrition goals--reduce child overweight, wasting and stunting, diabetes among women and men, anaemia in women of reproductive age and obesity among women and men, and increase exclusive breastfeeding--by 2025, says the report.

The nine goals were adopted by WHO member countries in 2012 and 2013 to reduce all forms of malnutrition by 2025.

The fifth such report, compiled by GNR’s Independent Expert Group comprising academics, researchers and government representatives, was released at the ‘Accelerating the End of Hunger and Malnutrition’ conference in Bangkok, Thailand on November 29, 2018. The conference was jointly organised by the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.

India has shown improvement in reducing child stunting but with 46.6 million stunted children, according to the report, the country is home to over 30.9% of all stunted children under five--the highest in the world.

India, however, has shown no progress or declining parameters related to six other global nutrition goals (information on two goals is not available).

Only 94 of 194 countries are on track to achieve at least one of the nine global nutrition targets, says the report. “While [globally] there has been progress in reduction of stunting, there has been slow reduction of anaemia and underweight in women while overweight and obesity is getting worse,” said Corinna Hawkes, co-chair of the report and Director of the Centre for Food Policy, at the release of the report.

India reduces numbers of undernourished, but still bears 23.8% of the global burden of malnourishment

India had 195.9 million undernourished people--or people with chronic nutritional deficiency--in 2015-17, down from 204.1 million in 2005-07, according to FAO data. The prevalence of undernourishment has also gone down from 20.7% in 2005-07 to 14.8% in 2015-17.

India, however, still accounts for 23.8% of the global burden of malnourishment, and has the second-highest estimated number of undernourished people in the world after China, according to FAO.

Business Standard