Left to starve

The COVID-19 lockdown is likely to render millions of children in India malnourished

- KUNDAN PANDEY

NEARLY HALF of India’s children are already undernourished and the country’s handling of the pandemic is expected to push many more to malnutrition. “Anganwadis have not provided food to children since April, when the centres were either converted into quarantine centres or closed down due to the pandemic,” says Sundari Tirki, general secretary of Anganwadi Karmchari Sabha in Jharkhand. She adds that for many children, the food served at Anganwadi centres is the only nutritious and filling meal of the day. Yet the lockdown has meant that none of the women self-help groups responsible for running these rural child care have served food in the past five months.

The damage such disruptions can cause is scary. It can, for example, make millions of children malnourished, says a paper published in the Journal of Global Health Science. In Jharkhand alone, 0.35 million children can become severely malnourished and another 0.36 million underweight, warns the paper, “Living on the edge?

Sensitivity of child undernutrition prevalence to bodyweight shocks in the context of the 2020 national lockdown strategy in India”. The worry does not end there. Another 0.5 million children in Jharkhand can become wasted, and 0.4 million severe wasted. A child is wasted when s/he has low weight for height. It is triggered either by poor diet or infectious diseases like diarrhoea. Underweight is defined as low weight-for-age. A child who is underweight may be stunted, wasted or both.