NOURISH TO FLOURISH

REDUCING MALNUTRITION

MALNUTRI

TION

GENDER INEQUALITY

HUGE LEAKAGES IN

WELFARE SCHEMES

POVERTY

Lack of awareness/education among women

Translates to Child malnutrition

Where

India

Sta

nds 58% children stunted in more

than 100 districts

Less than 2.5% of world’s land to feed 17.5% of world’s

population

92% mothers in villages have never heard the word

Malnutrition

Mid May Meal Scheme to provide cooked food to more

than 1.3 million students

Integrated Child Development Scheme for 0-6 aged children and pregnant women

United Nations Children’s Fund for health, education, water & sanitation

Programmes currently Midway to fight Malnutrition

ISSUES AT THE MACROLEVELISSUES AT THE MICROLEVEL

• Sanitation is a big issue in villages, India accounts for 56 % of open defecation. Infection rates are powerfully associated with such unsanitary conditions, leading to an increased need to ingest nutrients and fluids and a depressed appetite.

• Grave social disparities also aggravate the problem in many villages where the marginal groups are not given fair share of food or health facilities.

• Gender disparity is also a big issue. Lack of awareness and appropriate food intake among mothers often results in undernourishment of her children.

• The majority of subsidised food does not reach its intended recipients due to large leakages in the Public Distribution System.

• Coordination among various health and food schemes is missing. As a result the invested funds are not able to generate the desired/intended results.

• 6.6 million tonnes run the risk of getting spoiled every year due to lack of adequate storage facilities.

• Focus of the Government programs is on the quantity of grains not on the coverage of the essential nutrients for balanced health.

• The assumption that declining calorie consumption implies increasing malnourishing is unwarranted

• The general idea that decline in calorie consumption represents increased poverty and , therefore increased hunger is misplaced.

• This is because the purchasing capacity of the population of the people has risen considerably

• Malnutrition is primarily due to uninformed and unhealthy consumption rather than hunger.

Malnutrition and its Linkages

Problems with the current schemes

• To provide grains to beneficiaries at highly subsidized prices who may already be consuming adequate grains with malnutrition, reflecting lack of balanced diet is not a viable policy.

• Waste, leakage, theft and high delivery costs of the PDS schemes make them even more pointless

• A study indicated that in 2004-05, 70 % of the poor received no grain through the public distribution system while the 70% of those who received were non-poor.

• Beneficiaries can buy grains at low prices from the PDS and sell it in the private market for cash at a profit, thereby, not increasing the consumption of food among the target group.

Nutritious

Food Clean Water Healthy Environment

Food Nutrition Clean Water Sustainable Environment

• Need to reorient agricultural research and development priorities to make them more nutrition sensitive.

• Testing and remedial action use of scientific techniques like GIS can assist in mapping, modelling and decision-making.

• Awareness of the entitlements to be increased from the present below 20 % to above 80 %

• Need to design more policies targeted towards the 0-3 year age group who are the most vulnerable to nutrition insults.

• Promote School Water Supply Program by integrating schemes like Sarva Siksha Abhiyan,Swajaldhara Programs for 6-14 age group.

• Target emancipation of backward classes and FOCUS groups who are often the most affected

• Sustained supply of food production and checks over inflation in the prices of food grains

• Awareness drives, increased accountability and Exploring simple, low cost technologies

• Reorient Anganwadi Kendras on the line of ASHA system to make them more effective

STRENGTHEN ICDS

EMPOWER ANGANWADI KENDRAS

BRING IN CASH TRANSFERS

How to Reorient Governmental Policies to fight the menace of Malnutrition

• Replace ready-to-eat food with locally cooked meals• Change the diet pattern regularly to ensure wholesome food• Increase the content of proteins, vitamins and minerals in

the diet

• Ensure that health workers visit Anganwadi Kendras regularly

• Increase awareness and responsiveness of Anganwadi workers

• ‘Take home rations’ and nutritional counselling for younger children

• Greatly minimizes the leakage along the distribution chain• Eliminates the huge wastage and spoilage of grains.• Empowers the beneficiaries by giving them the choice to

buy quality products.

IMPORT SECTOR REFORMS

AGRICULTURAL LAND HOLDINGS REFORMS

SUPPLY CHAIN REFORMS

Reforms Agenda

• Availability of food needed to promote good nutrition depends on both domestic production and imports

• Clearly, easing the imports through a reduced tariff on the essential component of food inflation can greatly alleviate their shortage in the long run.

• Reform the laws on sales and rental of agricultural land

• Ease of rentals and sales will help to consolidate holdings

• Very necessary incentive for making productivity enhancing investments in lands

• Development of contract -farming, which can cut back on all intermediaries and minimize wastage

• Uninterrupted supply of electricity at reasonable prices and good transport

• 2nd Green revolution to achieve food self-sufficiency

Supply Chain Reforms and Reducing

Barriers

Greater food production and Direct

Cash Transfers

Greater nutritional awareness and

responsiveness of Anganwadi workers

Challenges• Difficult to reform laws related to agricultural land

holdings in view of the tough resistance by large landowning farmers.

• Direct Cash transfers may not be the only panacea, the target group might not use it on nutritious food

• In the dormant states , many Anganwadis have been converted to feeding centres, supplementary nutrition programmes are also functioning badly

• Direct cash transfer scheme also requires full financial inclusion of more than 50 million Indians

The constant and sustained increase in the purchasing power capacity of the Indians does reflect that poverty or incapacity may not be the true causes of malnutrition. Awareness and appropriate nutritional coverage in the governmental food schemes is.

MitigationSince more than 90 percent of villages in India today have an Anganwadi, these findings point to a very important opportunity: India already has a functional country-wide infrastructure to reach out to children under 6, most susceptible to malnutrition.

References

• HUNGaMA -Fighting Hunger & Malnutrtion Survey Report : 2011• An Uncertain Glory : India and its contrsdictions –Amrtya Sen and John Dreze• Why Growth Matters: Jagdish N. Bhagwati and Arvind Panagariya• India An emerging giant : Arvind Panagariya• Hunger and Malnutrition in India : Status, Causes and Cures (Association of

Voluntary Agencies for Rural Development)• http://www.tradingeconomics.com/india/gdp-per-capita-ppp• http://www.gatesfoundation.org/What-We-Do/Global-Development/Nutrition• Department of Food and Public Distribution http://dfpd.nic.in/