Dr Sebanti Ghosh is a public health and nutrition expert, with more than 20 years of experience in the health and development sector. She is the Country Program Director of Alive & Thrive India, a global nutrition initiative to save lives, prevent illness, and ensure healthy growth of mothers and children. The organisation works in countries including Ethiopia, Bangladesh, Vietnam, India and Nigeria. In this interview with TheCSRUniverse, she talks about the state of malnutrition in India and how it can effectively be dealt with a proper implementation strategy.
Q: How big is the problem of malnutrition in India and why is it important for the country to fight malnutrition on a priority basis?
A: High burden of malnutrition persists in India, with considerable variability across districts and states and variable improvement across states. Stunting and malnutrition rates went down by close to 10 percentage points between 2005 and 2015, with higher than average declines in some states. But ,as per Comprehensive National Nutrition Surveillance (CNNS), 2016-18 one in three children under five years remained stunted(34.7%), one in three underweight(33.4%) and one in five wasted; and as per National Family Health Survey (NFHS 4), 2015 -16, one in five babies were born with low birth weight and one in two women of reproductive age are anaemic. More than one-fifth (22.9 percent) of all women in India aged 15–49 yrs and 2 in 5 adolescent girls (15-19 years) are undernourished, with a body mass index of less than 18.5. Those averages mask considerable inter- and intra-state variability. Read More…
