[Igor Antunov]

Child malnutrition levels twice as high as those in sub-Saharan Africa are country's 'national shame', says PM

The Indian prime minister has called local levels of child malnutrition in the country a "national shame" and pledged stronger action to bring hundreds of millions of his people out of poverty.

Manmohan Singh was speaking on Tuesday at the release of a report revealing that despite recent year-on-year GDP growth rates of 8% or 9%, more than four in 10 children under five years old in the emerging economic powerhouse are malnourished and many more suffer from stunted growth.

The levels were almost twice as high those found in sub-Saharan Africa, said the report, which is based on data collected by over 1,000 surveyors who interviewed 74,020 mothers and measured 109,093 children.

Campaigners have long raised the issue of child malnutrition as a measure of how many Indians still live in deep poverty. However, the researchers also found that rates of child malnutrition are significant among wealthier families.

The number of underweight children in India has dropped by a fifth over seven years. Though "encouraging" this was still "unacceptably high", said Singh, who leads a beleaguered coalition government.

Public distribution schemes designed to combat child malnutrition in India are among the biggest in the world. However, endemic graft and logistic problems mean that only a fraction of the aid actually reaches the needy.

The Indian government now hopes to put a new subsidy scheme in place. Critics have attacked the programme as unworkable and expensive. Continuing food inflation is also causing problems for many of India's worst-off.

In 2010 researchers at Oxford University found that there were more poor people in eight states of India than in the 26 countries of sub-Saharan Africa. More than 410 million people live in poverty in the eight states where the "intensity" of the poverty in parts of India is equal to, if not worse than, that in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the war-racked African nation.

The new report identified a lack of basic hygiene in India as one serious problem, finding that only 11% of mothers said they used soap to wash hands before a meal and only 19% after a visit to the toilet.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/ja ... onal-shame

And there's more:

More than two-thirds of Indian milk is adulterated with items ranging from salt to detergent and may be unsafe to drink, a government watchdog says.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-16487993

And this country is supposed to hit 2 billion by 2050? It's headed straight for mass starvation.

[Eauz]

India is in a sad state of development. I guess it would be embarassing to suggest that a democracy in India is a failure. I have never bought into the propaganda in favour of India. Just take for example Myanmar. Just over a year ago, the West was criticising the government for violating human rights and during the tsunami that hit, it was all about the extreme poverty in the country. Now that it has opened up a bit and there is a chance of investment, almost none of that is discussed or reported. I remember watching a BBC report about how great an opportunity it is for businesses around the world to have the Myanmar government open itself up to the West. As long as the country has opened itself up to Western investment, the mass amount of poverty, possibly with levels higher than sub-Saharan Africa, India gets positive attention in the news.

[Igor Antunov]

Yeah you bring up perceptions, which in the physical sense are meaningless. It's all smoke and mirrors. The situation on the ground defines a country in the long term.

India needs some practical solutions. It's a country with severe problems, chiefly ones of poor governance on the national level and overpopulation. The poverty that stems from that ugly duo is the result.