India
Malnutrition thins India's economic growth
By IANS
Mar 3, 2006, 12:37

India has one of the world's worst rates of childhood malnutrition, a fact that keeps the country from developing even faster, said a World Bank report released Thursday.


According to the report - "Repositioning Nutrition as Central to Development", malnutrition is the world's most serious health problem and poor nutrition is implicated in more than half of all child deaths worldwide.

"Unless action is taken within the first two years of a child's life to improve nutrition, children will suffer irreparable damage, ultimately adversely affecting the country's economic growth," the report said.

"India and Ethiopia have about the same levels of malnutrition. And 26 percent of children in the highest income bracket in India are underweight and 65 percent are anaemic," said Meera Shekar, a nutrition specialist and the report's author.

"Anaemic children perform less well in school, are more likely to drop out and have lower intellectual and physical productivity as adults.

"Everyone talks about how well India is doing in the IT industry. Imagine how much better it could do, if 65 percent of the richest and 88 percent of the poorest children were not anaemic," the report said.

Contrary to popular belief, it revealed that the rates of malnutrition in South Asia are almost double those in Sub-Saharan Africa.

"We find that the problem is much more severe in South Asia than in Sub-Saharan Africa. Roughly 50 percent of children in South Asia are undernourished as compared to about 25 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa," Shekar said.

"But we also find that the problem is not limited to those two regions alone. There are countries in other regions - Indonesia, Uzbekistan, Yemen, Guatemala and Peru - where the problem is acute as well."

Criticising the lack of large-scale action internationally and within countries to tackle malnutrition, the report says improving nutrition could add two to three percent to the growth rates of poor countries.

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