Global Nutrition Report

Context:

Malnutrition remains one of India’s biggest challenges, according to the 2020 Global Nutrition Report released worldwide.

Key-highlights of the Report

• Most people across the world cannot access or afford healthy food, due to agricultural systems that favor calories over nutrition as well as the ubiquity and low cost of highly processed foods.
• Inequalities exist across and within countries.
• Not one country is on course to meet all 10 of the 2025 global nutrition targets and just eight of 194 countries are on track to meet four targets.

Global Nutrition Targets:

• In 2012, the World Health Assembly identified 6 nutrition targets for maternal, infant, and young child nutrition to be met by 2025.
• These require governments to:
  • reduce stunting by 40% in children under 5 and prevalence of anemia by 50% among women in the age group of 19-49 years.
  • ensure 30% reduction in low-birth-weight and no increase in childhood overweight. Decrease the rate of exclusive breastfeeding in the first six months up to at least 50%. D reduce and maintain childhood wasting to less than 5%.

India’s Nutritional Story

• Against global targets for 10 specific parameters set for 2019, three had no data, one showed “some progress”, while six were marked “no progress or worsening.’’
• India is among 88 countries that are likely to miss global nutrition targets by 2025. India is also the country with the highest rates of domestic inequalities in malnutrition.
• The country is identified as among the three worst countries, along with Nigeria and Indonesia, for steep within-country disparities on stunting, where the levels varied four-fold across communities.
• However, the under-five mortality (per 1000 births) rate showed a clear decline from 43.6 percent in 2015 to 36.6 percent in 2018.
• Other statistics for India (2016 figures) show that it has 0.76 physicians, 2.09 nurses and midwives, and 0.58 community health workers per 1000 people.