India needs to scale up direct nutrition interventions

Posted By
10Pointer
Categories
Polity & Governance
Published
6th Jul, 2022

Context

More than seven decades after independence, India still suffers from the public health issues such as child malnutrition attributing to 68.2% of under-five child mortality.

Data from the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-5 2019-21, as compared to NFHS-4 2015-16, reveals a substantial improvement in the period of four to five years in several proxy indicators of women’s empowerment.

What is malnutrition?

Malnutrition refers to deficiencies, excesses or imbalances in a person’s intake of energy and/or nutrients.
The term malnutrition covers 2 broad groups of conditions.

Undernutrition

Overweight

stunting (low height for age)
wasting (low weight for height)
underweight (low weight for age)
micronutrient deficiencies or insufficiencies (a lack of important vitamins and minerals)

obesity
diet-related non-communicable diseases (such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer)

NFHS-4 v/s NFHS-5

As per the NFHS-5 2019-21, India has substantially improved in various indicators of women’s empowerment as compared to the NFHS-4 2015-16. The substantial improvements are:

Antenatal service attendance (58.6 to 70.0%)
women having their own saving bank accounts (63.0 to78.6%)
women owning mobile phones that they themselves use (45.9 % to 54.0%)
women married before 18 years of age (26.8 % to 23.3 %)
women with 10 or more years of schooling (35.7% to 41.0%)
access to clean fuel for cooking (43.8 % to 68.6%)

National Nutrition Mission (NNM)

Government appears determined to set it right — with an aggressive push to the National Nutrition Mission (NNM), rebranding it the Prime Minister’s Overarching Scheme for Holistic Nutrition, or POSHAN.
Window of opportunity: The Ministry of Women and Child (MWCD) continues to be the nodal Ministry implementing the NNM with a vision to align different ministries to work in tandem on the “window of opportunity” of the first 1,000 days in life (270 days of pregnancy and 730 days; 0-24 months).
POSHAN Abhiyaan (now referred as POSHAN 2.0) rightly places a special emphasis on selected high impact essential nutrition interventions, combined with nutrition-sensitive interventions, which indirectly impact mother, infant and young child nutrition, such as improving coverage of maternal-child health services, enhancing women empowerment, availability, and access to improved water, sanitation, and hygiene and enhancing homestead food production for a diversified diet.