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How hunger came back to haunt India Starting in the mother’s womb, the first 1,000 days of a child’s life provide a window of opportunity to improve the child’s nutrition and health outcomes. Those are closely linked to better education, earnings, and health outcomes in later life. (Photo: HT) Reetika Khera With data showing a worrying rise in child undernutrition, urgent action is required. Where are the gaps? Getting ICDS services running immediately should be top priority, along with ...

India could be seeing an increase in child undernutrition, reversing decades of gains, early data from the just-released first phase of the latest National Family Health Survey (NFHS) indicate. If subsequent phases display similar trends, this would represent the first increase in child stunting--low height for age--in 20 years. More infants now receive immunisations, data released on December 12 show. On the positive side, fewer women in 15 of the 22 states and union territories (UTs) for wh...

infant nutrition play a role in stunting; hence increases in stunting are not necessarily a referendum on the health or nutrition policies of the current government, Purnima Menon, a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute, cautioned. “But it is not good news,” she said, adding that stunting of children born between 2015 and 2019 likely reflected, in part, the economic slowdown of the last few years. We spoke at length with Purnima Menon, a senior researc...