India may adopt new WHO norms

The government is contemplating adopting the new WHO standards on child growth that can help improve India's poor rating on the global child nourishment index, reports Chetan Chauhan.

Published on: Feb 9, 2007, 01:14:00 IST

None | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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The government is contemplating adopting the new World Health Organisation standards on child growth that can help improve India's poor rating on the global child nourishment index. Indian children have been rated even worse than children in Sub-Saharan Africa.

Women and Child Development Secretary Deep Jain Singh said the decision will be taken after the two-day national workshop that started on Thursday. Representatives of state governments, Ministries of Health and Family Welfare and WCD; UNICEF and WHO are participating in the workshop. Singh said there was a need to deliberate on switching over from existing standards — adopted in the mid-seventies — to another classification so that growth monitoring data from the Integrated Child Development Scheme is not at variance with the underweight prevalence revealed by other international reports.

Dr Mercedes De Onis of WHO said the new standards are based on a six-month breastfeeding mandate as against the earlier norm of artificial food supplement since childbirth. "The 1970 standards were based on a study on American children of English origin and did not reflect the true global picture," she admitted.

It took WHO 17 years to devise new standards based on simultaneous studies in six countries — including India, Brazil, Ghana, the US and Oman. Over 300 newborns breastfed for six month in rich, educated south Delhi were identified for the study by the Society for Applies Studies. "Their growth was tabulated for three years; that was India's input for the new standards," said Dr Nita Bhandari, who supervised the study.

WCD officials feel the new standards will reflect the achievements of the ICDS. But a survey by The Right to Food Campaign in six states shows the scheme to be in tatters. The report, distributed at the workshop, has found the participation of children from deprived sections (OBC, Muslim, SC/ST) to be lower than from the general category due to caste discrimination by anganwadi workers.

Email Chetan Chauhan: cchauhan @hindustantimes.com

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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