India Child Hunger
Access to healthy and nutritious foods within India has been increasingly replaced by a large supply of high-calorie, low-nutrient foods. The existence of the dual malnutrition problems suggests a need for policy makers to support options which measure nutritional output, as opposed to calories, when deciding policies to ensure a well fed society. Thus, the causes of undernourishment and of death from hunger and malnutrition of children are immensely complex, and they cannot be simply attributed to war or natural catastrophes. They are primarily due to social injustice, to political and economic exclusion and to discrimination.
Children of families with lower socioeconomic standing are faced with sub-optimal growth. While children in similar communities have shown to share similar levels of nutrition, child nutrition is also differential from family to family depending on the mother's characteristics, household ethnicity, and place of residence. It is expected that with improvements in socio-economic welfare, child nutrition will also improve. In 3 schools in Andhra Pradesh, India, nearly 200 underprivileged children come to school hungry every day.
Also, other Indians are strictly vegan, which means, they do not consume any sort of animal product, including dairy and eggs. This is a serious problem when inadequate protein is consumed because 56% of poor Indian households consume cereal to consume protein. It is observed that the type of protein that cereal contains does not parallel to the proteins that animal products contain . This phenomenon is most prevalent in the rural areas of India where more malnutrition exists on an absolute level. Whether children are of the appropriate weight and height is highly dependent on the socio-economic status of the population.
Antaryami Dash of Save The Children also highlighted the impact of COVID-19 on the crisis of hunger and undernutrition. Clean Water Charity India However, Mr Dash says that the Global Hunger Index is helpful as a tool for prioritising our national programs. We need to construe the index more carefully and further unpack the interplay between stunting, wasting and mortality.
On an individual level, a person can be obese, yet lack enough nutrients for proper nutrition. On a societal level, the dual burden refers to populations containing both overweight and underweight individuals co-existing. Women in India share a substantial proportion of the dual burden on malnutrition. The primary causes of whether a woman falls into the obese or underweight under-nutritional category is dependent on the socioeconomic status of the individual, and dependent on rural or urban populations. Women with higher economic means in urban areas fall into obese and overnourished category, while conversely lower income women in rural areas are underweight and undernourished. A consistent factor among dual burden outcomes relates primarily to food security issues.