The survey, released by the Union health ministry, also shows that 35% of children under the age of 5 are stun... Read More

The first Comprehensive National Nutritional Survey (CNNS) has shockingly found that only 6.4% of Indian children aged less than two years get a “minimum acceptable diet”. This proportion varies widely across states from barely 1.3% in Andhra Pradesh to 35.9% in Sikkim and it isn’t a case of the ‘usual suspects’ being at the bottom of the heap.

Indeed, at the very tail end of the list, Andhra has Maharashtra (2.2%), Gujarat , Telangana and Karnataka (all 3.6%) and Tamil Nadu (4.2%) for company among the states seen as developed by most yardsticks. At the other end of the spectrum, while Kerala in second spot (32.6%) is no surprise, states like Odisha, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand and Assam are above the national average despite being viewed as ‘backward’ on most counts.

The survey, released by the Union health ministry, also shows that 35% of children under the age of 5 are stunted (low height for age). In this age group, 17% are wasted (low weight for height) and 33% underweight (low weight for age). In contrast, about 2% were overweight or obese. Among those aged between 6 months and 59 months, 11% were acutely malnourished.

In the 5-9 year age group, 22% were stunted, 10% underweight and 4% overweight or obese. The findings point to the alarming, though gradually improving, situation in terms of nutrition of children in India, with poverty playing the most important role and dietary restrictions also adding to it in some cases.

In the adolescents, 10 to 19 years old, 24% were too thin and 5% were overweight or obese. The skew across economic classes was evident in the fact that while just 1% of adolescents from the poorest households were overweight, in the richest households that proportion was 12% or roughly one in eight children.

The survey also found that 10% of school-age children and adolescents in the country were pre-diabetic with the proportion varying widely across states.

The CNNS is the largest micronutrients survey ever conducted in India and interviewed over 1.1 lakh children and adolescents and collected anthropometric measurements from them. Blood, urine and stool samples were also drawn from over 51,000 children and adolescents for the survey, which studied background characteristics of those surveyed, including the diet and education of their mothers, the community and caste profiles and the income brackets they fell into.

