The Bihar government does not admit to a single hunger death in recent years. But civil rights activists insist that malnutrition and hunger have been significant issues in the state.
Almost 52% of kids under three are undernourished in Uttar Pradesh which also has a high mortality rate at 768/1000 live births.
The Nongmaithem family is an example of how Manipur has benefited from the state health programmes. The infant mortality rate has dipped to 11 in 2011 from 14 in 2010.
At 59 deaths per 1000 births, Madhya Pradesh has the highest infant mortality rate. Many malnourished families know nothing about government schemes.
The percentage of children below the age of two suffering from chronic malnutrition in Maharashtra has come down to 22.8% in 2012 from 39% five years ago.
In a bid to tackle urban malnutrition, the state government on Monday launched a programme under the state’s RJMC Health and Nutrition Mission, focusing on pregnant women and children up to two years of age.
HT reports.
Less than three weeks after a child from a Santacruz slum was rendered blind by malnutrition, another starving child has been admitted with the same condition.
Just over four years old, Surya Mariappa from Santacruz weighs only six kilos – half the weight of healthy children his age. Admitted to civic-run Sion hospital, the child lost his eyesight after a long period of near starvation,
Priyanka Vora reports.
Most cases don’t even reach hospitals; five children below the age of six died in Govandi last month, 88 cases were reported from the same area.
The report of the Bombay high court-appointed Malnutrition Monitoring Committee (MMC), submitted in February this year, has been in cold-storage.
Surya Mariappa, a four-year-old who weighs 6kg, is not the only starving child in his family, that lives in a Santacruz slum.
At a time when India plans a multi-pronged attack on malnutrition in 200 high-burden districts, it will pay to examine the cracks in state institutions that have led to past failures and can still derail well-intentioned plans.
Pramit Bhattacharya reports.
Pics
Some 60km from the razzle-dazzle of Udaipur —a city that boasts of India ’s second-costliest residential building after Mukesh Ambani’s apartment in Mumbai— an unlettered 14-year-old in Jalampura village squats on his haunches weighing his existence.
Suman prances about like a normal six year old, except that she gets irritated when people call her "angrez" (westerner). Vitamin-A deficient children with golden hair abound at village Thoss in the Tijara block of Rajasthan's Alwar district - for understandable reasons too.
Each time 25 year old Salma takes her one year old son Zubair to the Batla Clinic (a private clinic in Delhi) for a shot of the DPT, the cost of transportation and the vaccine adds up to approximately Rs.500.