The government withholds a report on nutrition that contains valuable lessons
A REMARKABLE story has been unfolding in the past decade in India. A new study—conducted by the government and the UN agency for children, Unicef—offers evidence of a steady and widespread fall in malnutrition. But the picture is still grim. Judged by measures such as the prevalence of “stunting” (when children are unusually short for their age) and “wasting” (when they weigh too little for their height), India is still vastly hungrier than Africa.
India’s government has been sitting on the report for months, though it has been ready since at least October. One rumour suggests official concern about the quality of the data, but Unicef has voiced no such worry. Another possible reason is the pride of India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, who ruled Gujarat for a dozen years. The new data indicate his relatively prosperous state performed worse than many poorer ones. The Economist has obtained the report, known as the Rapid Survey on Children (RSOC). It shows gains at both national and state levels.
Much of what hitherto was known about nutrition in India came from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) conducted by the government in 2005 and 2006. Work on a follow-up is under way. Unicef and the government agreed in the meantime to conduct the RSOC. It involved 210,000 interviews across 29 states and territories in 2013 and 2014; more than 90,000 children were measured and weighed, as well as 28,000 teenage girls.
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