The special issue of the IDS Bulletin ‘Lifting the Curse: Overcoming Persistent Underutrition in India’
The special issue of the IDS Bulletin ‘Lifting the Curse: Overcoming Persistent Underutrition in India’ was launched in New Delhi on 16 September 2009. Brought out by the UK-based Institute of Development Studies at Sussex University and funded by
DFID, India, the special issue highlights the gaps of India’s economic performance related to its performance on reducing malnutrition. "
Normally we expect economic growth and improved nutrition to go hand-in-hand, but at the current rate India will not reach the Millennium Development Goal – to reduce by 50% the number of people suffering from hunger by 2015 – until 2043," said Lawrence Haddad, Director of the Institute of Development Studies, UK, and lead-editor of the Bulletin during his opening remarks at the launch.
Comprising 16 papers, primarily by Indian authors, the Bulletin collectively outlines the immense nutrition challenges in India but also point to ways forward for achieving rapid improvements. Two of the papers, ‘Accelerating Malnutrition Reduction in Orissa’ and ‘Bridging the Malnutrition Gap with Social Audits and Community Participation’ are based directly on work being undertaken by the Orissa and Madhya Pradesh TASTs. The Bulletin concludes that much of India’s poor performance in malnutrition can be attributed to a failure of governance. “
Nutrition it seems is nobody’s responsibility”, said Haddad. Concluding recommendations made by Haddad for overcoming India’s persistent under-nutrition are strongly aligned with TASTs support to nutrition at the state level -
- Fund communities and local governments to undertake social audits of the Integrated Child Development Scheme. Let the ultimate customers rate the provision and make the results public.
- Create new mechanisms that enable different government departments to work together to deliver food, care, and health in combinations that work
- Improve engagement by historically-excluded groups with nutrition programmes, in particular involving women from these groups in designing better outreach programmes
- Introduce simpler but more regular monitoring of nutrition status so that civil society and the media can hold the government and non-state actors to account