Malnourished children belie India’s ‘success’ story
By Krittivas Mukherjee
JAWHAR (India): Four-year-old Kamini Tumda lies in a hospital bed writhing in agony as a nurse gently washes her, removing flakes of tender skin that hang from her body.
Her swollen limbs stick out from a bony frame, emaciated by severe malnutrition. Doctors say her condition is life threatening.
“She has tuberculosis and pneumonia. We are trying, but this is malnutrition with kwashiorkor,” said Bharat Mahale, one of a team treating the girl in the western state of Maharashtra, just 125 km from India’s wealthiest city, Mumbai.
Kwashiorkor scars for life. Caused by a low protein intake, it leaves children with flaky skin, thinning hair and an enlarged liver. Doctors describe it as the severest form of malnutrition.
In a perverse reversal of other forms of intense hunger, a sufferer’s stomach swells to almost pot-belly proportions.
Tumda’s story is a darker, alternative narrative to modern India’s much trumpeted success story; the flipside to economic growth of eight per cent a year and tales of middle-class consumer excess.
Earlier this month, the UN’s children’s agency, Unicef, said that 57 million of the world’s 146 million malnourished children under the age of five were in India, by far the largest share of any nation.
Nearly half of Indian under-fives are underweight, it said.
According to official figures, about 1.2 million children under five die from malnutrition in India every year.
“It is a picture (of India) that is in stark contrast to the emerging face of an economic powerhouse,” said Madhura Kapdi of CRY, a leading Indian charity for children’s rights.
In Tumda’s village — a cluster of dusty red-tiled huts — children with reed-thin limbs and wearing tattered clothes lie on mud floors, enervated by malnutrition.
Village elders doze in the shade as a hot summer sun beats down on hundreds of miles of arid undulating plains in the western state of Maharashtra, one of the worst-hit by malnutrition.
Not far away is Mumbai, India’s financial capital, where skyscrapers gleam along a scenic waterfront, and a shiny parade of chauffeured Mercedes and BMWs deposit captains of industry at their offices.
India has long struggled with hunger amid plenty, due to real shortages in its poorest states, shoddy management of food stocks and social injustice.
“A lot of times there is very little food. So, this is also about starvation in several pockets of states like Orissa, Jharkhand and Chhattisgarh,” Gopinath Menon, spokesman for Unicef, told Reuters.
Despite the need, tonnes of grain and vegetables rot in granaries every year due to lack of adequate storage.
Three decades ago, India proudly announced that a green revolution engineered since independence from Britain had ensured that extreme hunger would be a thing of the past.
Yet malnutrition persists, often reflecting cultural traditions that are far harder to tackle than a simple lack of food: millions of women are poorly educated, marry when they are barely out of puberty and have little or no say in the nutrition of their children.
“Economic growth alone is not a guarantee that its benefits will percolate to every segment of society,” said V. Ramani, director-general of the state-run Nutrition and Health Mission. “The problem in India is a combination of economic and social issues.”
Across much of India’s vast countryside, superstitious mothers only begin to breastfeed their babies three days after giving birth, believing that the yellow colostrom that a mother produces after a pregnancy and a rich source of protein and protection against infection, is dirty.
Experts say widespread malnutrition impacts dramatically on economic growth, with the World Bank saying that in the poorest countries it slashes three per cent from annual economic growth.
Malnourished children will struggle at school — if they go at all — and earn 10 per cent less during their working life and are more prone to infections, including HIV.
The situation has improved: 10 years ago more than six million children died every year in India from malnutrition.
But experts say direct nutrition programmes are required rather than relying on wealth to trickle down to those at the bottom. In India each village has a child nutrition centre where mothers can have their sons and daughters monitored, but only 15 per cent of under-fives attend.
For Tumda and millions like her, the immediate fight is for survival.
“We have promised the doctors we will take good care of her once she is cured,” said Raju Tumda, the girl’s father, a construction worker who makes less than $3 a day carrying sand bags on his back.—Reuters
