Wealth and child welfare are sensitive topics in India. As the country has grown richer in the past couple of decades, Indians’ health has improved only slowly. The story has varied widely from state to state. Governments of southern ones like Kerala and Tamil Nadu do a lot to help women and children; health indicators there show steady gains. In the north and west, even in better-off states, nutrition, prenatal care, school attendance and other measures of childhood well-being are worse than in the south.
A much-debated case study is the western state of Gujarat, where Narendra Modi was chief minister for a dozen years before becoming prime minister. Calling his state a model, he boasted that incomes there were among India’s highest. He dismissed critics who said he was neglecting health and social policy—once explaining how Gujarati women suffer high levels of malnourishment because they are “beauty-conscious” and refuse to eat.
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