Strengthening the Role of Agriculture for a Nutrition Secure India

Suneetha Kadiyala P.K. Joshi and S. Mahendra Dev with T. Nanda Kumar and Vijay Vyas NUTRITION INSECURITY IN INDIA India’s progress in improving nutrition has been unacceptably slow: given the country’s positive economic trajectory, nutrition has improved at only half the expected pace.1 Almost one in two Indian children is stunted and 40 percent are underweight. One-third of all Indian women are underweight. Rates of micronutrient deficiencies are extremely high, with almost 80 percent of children and 56 percent of women being anemic (see Figure 1). Countries such as China, Thailand, and Brazil have taken bold actions to successfully accelerate reductions in undernutrition and are on track to reach the first Millennium Development Goal on target, by the year 2015. But India will do so only in 2043 with its present pace of actions. In the meantime, undernutrition continues to exert a physical, cognitive, and economic toll, costing India as much as 3 percent of its GDP per year. The Copenhagen Consensus 2008 lists combating micronutrient undernutrition as the best development investment, with the rate of return in terms of improved health, reduced deaths, and increased income opportunities more than 15 times than the investment.