One-third of India’s women and children under the age of five are underweight and micronutrient deficiencies are common. The country, however, is making progress against hunger as shown by India moving up eight places from last year on the Global Hunger Index (GHI) to rank 55th out of 76 nations.

To explore related aspects of nutrition improvement across various sectors, the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI), whose members co-authored the GHI report, kicked off the two-day ‘Together for Nutrition 2014’ conference here on Wednesday. Attended by more than 200 researchers and government officials, the event, jointly hosted by ‘Transform Nutrition’ (TN) and POSHAN, looks to trigger leadership for nutrition at various geographical levels and to assess cross-sectoral actions.

“India is home to a third of the world’s stunted children. There is significant opportunity for us to help our children reach their full potential not only through direct feeding programmes but also through improved access to toilets and empowerment of their mothers,” said Ramanan Laxminarayan, Vice-President (Research & Policy), Public Health Foundation of India, which is TN’s lead partner in India, in a statement.

MUCH TO BE DONE

India’s improved standing on the GHI index was almost driven by key data being released by the Government, said Purnima Menon, Senior Research Fellow, IFPRI and Co-Director, POSHAN.

“The data relating to the proportion of underweight children was finally released so it’s been a watershed year in a sense. Broadly, the reason for the decline was steady economic growth as a result of which numerous social sector programmes were initiated even if implementation has been shaky between States. More analysis is required though in order to understand why such a decline was registered,” she said to reporters on the sidelines of the event.

Marie Ruel, Director of IFPRI’s Poverty, Health and Nutrition division, said, “The data for India had not been updated so what was being used prior to this report was from 2005. The big change is mainly due to the new data and it’s a 10-year change.”

The 2014 GHI report ranked nations on three equally weighted indicators, among them the proportion of underweight children under the age of five. It mentions that the underweight children data it used for India was provisional, based on a survey conducted by the Ministry of Women and Child Development with UNICEF support in 2013-14. The national underweight estimate was the first in eight years and at 30.7 per cent, was a substantial fall from 43.5 per cent as recorded in 2005-06.

“Despite the improvement, India still ranks below Angola, Namibia, Zimbabwe, Swaziland and Kenya among others. Clearly, there’s still a long way to go,” said Shenggen Fan, Director General, IFPRI.

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