Let’s Give Priority To Nutritonal Needs of Kids

Context: Identifying underweight, wasted, and stunted children and providing the needed interventions is vital for preserving the physical and cognitive ability of millions of children.

Observations under the National Family Health Survey (NFHS) 2020:

• Increased Wasting: Around one-fifth of the children less than five years of age fall in the ‘wasted ’ low-weight-for-height category; there has been an increase in wasted and underweight children.
• Increase in undernutrition in high-performing states: Kerala, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa and Himachal Pradesh.
• Better performance by the outliers: Bihar and Assam.

Reasons Behind Rising Undernutrition in Infants:

• Issues with supplementary feeding programmes: They are unable to reach results home where lies faulty feeding and unhygienic child-rearing practices of infants (leading to diseases).
  • E.g. Integrated Child Development Scheme (ICDS) was never able to reach the age-group where the problem of wasting starts, i.e. 6-months to 3 years (even with 14 million Anganwari Centres)
  • Poshan programme (measured by Body-Mass Index): was not designed to address the invisible needs of an infant because those problems reside mostly at home.
    • The challenge is to teach the mother simple recipes to introduce complementary feeding six months after exclusive breastfeeding (which isn’t often done).
• Low calorific intake in infants: consumption of pulses, vegetables, and fruit which affects the absorption of nutrition, particularly iron, is low in kids (as indicated by National Sample Survey).
• Covid-19 has diminished the focus on infants.

Way Forward:

• Identify local drivers of underweight and wasting.
• Extend outreach of foot soldiers: including Auxiliary Nurse Midwives (ANMs), ASHAs and Anganwari workers to visit the homes of identified at-risk children.
  • The task is not difficult as only 15% of the infant population of the villages are wasted.
• National programme to manage nutritionally at-risk infants: and their mothers at the household level as an add-on to POSHAN (requires not just training but ownership).
• Institutional back up with local presence: and capacity to perceive infant undernutrition as a grave problem. E.g. Panchayat Raj members should be trained and incentivised for the decline in wasting.