Indian teen girls most ill-fed: UN

Indian adolescents girls are worse than even those in world’s poorest region -- Sub-Saharan Africa – in terms of nutrition and empowerment, a new United Nations report on adolescents on Friday said. Chetan Chauhan reports. Health and social indicators

Updated on: Feb 26, 2011, 02:14:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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Indian adolescents girls are worse than even those in world’s poorest region -- Sub-Saharan Africa – in terms of nutrition and empowerment whereas a majority of boys are at high risk because of their sexual activity, a new United Nations report on adolescents on Friday said.

The report, ‘Adolescence an Age of Opportunity’, released three days before the union budget had found that 63 per cent of the Indian boys in the age group of 15-19 were engaged in high-risk sex with non-marital, non-cohabitating partner as compared to just one percent girls in the same age group.

Still it was lowest in the developing world with the highest being in South Africa with 95 % boys and 99 % girls reporting high risk sex. The report found sexual activity among Asian children below the age of 15, including India, to be lowest in the world.

Indian adolescent (10-19 years) constitute about 20 per cent of total adolescents in the world with a figure of 243 million. About 35 % of boys and 19 % of girls have a comprehensive knowledge about the HIV/AIDS, which is highest among the developing world.

The good part ends here.

The Indian adolescent girl (15-19) is among most deprived globally, with 47 % being malnourished, highest in the world, and 56 % being anemic, second to sub-saharan Africa.

“Such nutritional deprivation continue throughout the life cycle and are often passed on to the next generation,” the report in a special page dedicated to India said.

The bad health gets aggravated with three in five women aged 20-49 getting married when they were adolescents as compared to one in 5 men and giving birth to a child in anemic condition.

Another indicator of continuing trend of early marriage was that in 2009, 27 % of Indian adolescent girls were married as compared to 23 % in the sub-saharan Africa. Overall, child marriage rate in India was 47 % in 2007, highest in the world.

Karin Hulshof, United Nations Children Fund (UNICEF) permanent representative in India complemented Indian government for reducing gender disparity among children up to 10 years of age but said that the “adolescents have been left out” and they were a new challenge for the government.

Admitting that there is no figure on how much the government spends on adolescents, D N Sikri, secretary Women and Child Development ministry, emphasized on number of number of interventions for adolescents, especially the girls. “We have introduced nutrition and health scheme for adolescent girls called SABLA in 200 districts. Already, 1.12 crore girls have registered to be beneficiaries under the scheme,” he said.

Majority of Indian earning adolescent girls have no power to decide on how to spend their earnings and justified beating by husband. "More than half of the girls in these 200 districts are school drop-outs," Sikri said.

Some NGO interventions such as Deepshikha in Chandrapur district had helped in getting girls enrolled back into the schools. Another in Maharashtra of giving life skill training to young girls has helped in extending the average marriage age by one year.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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