The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed all the existing cracks in our society, one of the most vital being the acute food insecurity faced by a large portion of the population. Even before the pandemic, most people in India suffered from some micronutrient deficiency. The World Health Organization has termed this “hidden hunger” where the quality of food consumed does not meet nutrient requirements and lacks essential vitamins and minerals.

As India went into lockdown, this trend was exacerbated among India’s poor and migrant populations, whose lives, uncertain at the best of times, became even more precarious, and hunger and malnutrition proliferated unchecked. A recent UNICEF report stated that nearly 1.2 million children could die in low income countries in the next six months due to decrease in routine health services and increase in wasting, of which nearly three lakh would be in India.

If this is to be mitigated, India must use the pandemic as an opportunity to come up with long term multi-stakeholder solutions to the country’s chronic food insecurity.

Food fortification is one simple solution to the problem. It involves adding trace amounts of micronutrients to staple foods during processing, which increases their nutritional value and paves the way to a more balanced diet. For a developing country like India, food fortification could be an economical and effective strategy to solve the country’s food insecurity.

While freshly cooked meals are ideal, in a large country like India, long distances and insufficient infrastructure become hurdles to access and availability. The pandemic has only served to spotlight these problems. Any solution would require increasing the shelf life of food products to withstand storage and long term supply, such that the emphasis is still on locally grown foods but includes their fortification, packaging and eventual supply.

In Gujarat, this could include freshly cooked theplas supplemented with Iron. In Karnataka, Vitamin A could be added to locally sourced rice to prepare idlis . The long-standing association of natural foods as ‘good’ and packaged foods as ‘bad’ is simplistic, not to mention unhelpful. Instead, each strategy must be evaluated in a more holistic sense, taking into account not just the processes that went into creating the food, but also that maximum nutrients should reach the maximum number of people.

The most neglected

Historically, under-nutrition in India has been concentrated in women and children, who are the most neglected and often suffer from a range of nutrient deficiencies. The National Family Health Survey (NFHS 5) indicates that since the onset of the pandemic, acute undernourishment in children below the age of five has worsened, with one in every three children below the age of five suffering from chronic malnourishment.

According to data collected by the Global Nutrition Report, 37.9 per cent of children under five are stunted, and 20.8 per cent are wasted, a form of malnutrition where children are too thin for their height. This is much higher than in other developing countries, where on an average 25 per cent of children suffer stunting and 8.9 per cent are wasted. In women between the ages of 15 to 49 years, anaemia continues to affect nearly 52 per cent of the target group.

However, any one could suffer from micronutrient deficiencies without even being aware of it, irrespective of which side of the urban-rural divide they fall on. When we lack micronutrients such as iron, Vitamin B-12, iodine and zinc in our food, it can lead to devastating effects even if we are consuming enough food. This includes compromised immune systems, low productivity, mental and physical retardation and higher mortality rates in pregnant and lactating women and infants.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, globally more than two billion individuals — or one in every three people — are afflicted with “hidden hunger.” One of the most effective ways of combating this is to ensure dietary diversity. Most people in India consume carbohydrate-rich diets, wheat and rice being the cheapest food sources. In the process, other aspects of a balanced diet such as pulses, fruits and vegetables, get neglected. This has threatened to push India back on its targets for health and nutrition set in the Sustainable Development Goals 2030 Agenda.

Possible approaches

There are a number of possible approaches to bolstering people’s daily dietary diversity. All of them would require a larger coordinated effort by all stakeholders in the food, nutrition and health industries to come up with innovative and economical ways to diversify people’s nutrient intake.

The government already has in place robust food security programmes such as the Targeted Public Distribution System (TDPS), which during the Covid-19 pandemic, doubled the free distribution of ration to 5 kg of rice/wheat and 1 kg of pulses per card holder; the Mid-Day Meal Programme, which services over 120 million children; and the Integrated Child Development Services (ICDS), which provides 100 million children under the age of six and pregnant and lactating mothers cooked meals and rations.

Regardless, any move to improve public health across the country will be a slow process, and would involve years of planning, dialogue and consultations between government bodies, development agencies, non-profits, food industry representatives, academia and consumer organisations. In all this, the Covid pandemic has done something unprecedented: It has spotlighted the urgency of the problem of food insecurity in India. We cannot put it off any longer. If we are serious about combating this scourge, we must start now.

The writer is President & CEO, India Council on Competitiveness and affiliate faculty, Harvard Business School

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