NEW DELHI: Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi has attributed his state's high rates of malnutrition to vegetarianism and figure-conscious Gujarati girls .

In an interview to The Wall Street Journal , an American news daily, Modi said, "The middle class is more beauty-conscious than health-conscious-that is a challenge."

"If a mother tells her daughter to have milk, they'll have a fight-she'll tell her mother, 'I won't drink milk. I'll get fat.'" he told the daily.

Modi's response came following the WSJ question that "about half of Gujarati children under five were stunted, or too short for their age, as of 2006, according to the latest available figures from the Indian government."

Among the industrial states with a high per capita income in India, Gujarat ranks pretty low on health and nutrition. It also performs worse than the national average and some of the poorer states on other human development indices. According to the third National Family Health Survey over 41 percent of Gujarati children under three years of age are underweight, which is worse than the national average. Over 55 percent of Gujarati women in the 15-45 age group are anaemic.

According to Gujarat state officials, the WSJ said, Modi government "ramped up spending on rural health workers who distribute food supplements to the poor to $340 million in the year ending March 31, 2013, from $37 million in the year ended in March 2007, and are working on programs to track the health and nutrition of pregnant adolescents."

Modi told the WSJ that his government "will try to get a drastic change in this."