London: Despite India's recent economic boom, at least 46 per cent of its children up to the age of 3 still suffer from malnutrition making the country home to a third of the world's malnourished children, a study said Thursday.
Noting that the country is an "economic powerhouse but a nutritional weakling", the report by the British-based Institute of Development Studies (IDS), which incorporated
papers by more than 20 India analysts, said "at least 46 per cent of children upto the age of 3 in India still suffer from malnutrition."
"It's the contrast between India's fantastic economic growth and its persistent malnutrition which is so shocking," Lawrence Haddad, director of the IDS told the reporters.
The UN defines malnutrition as a state in which an individual can no longer maintain natural bodily capacities such as growth, pregnancy, lactation, learning abilities,
physical work and resisting and recovering from disease.
The report said India will not meet the UN Millennium Development Goal of halving its number of hungry till 2043 though it had committed in 2001 to reach it by 2015.
The report also highlighted the Government's failure to improve basic living standards for most Indians despite its unprecedented economic growth since 2004.
Bureau Report
First Published: Thursday, September 17, 2009, 16:19