The child malnutrition is the largest human development gap that India faces. Unfortunately, its prevalence is much more than what one expects from GDP per capita or data on various measures of poverty for India. This is what UNICEF 1993 report on Progress of Nations called South Asian Enigma. Bangladesh, India, Nepal and Pakistan - in that order - are worse than whole of Africa when child malnutrition level is adjusted to GDP per capita.
Though there is close relationship between poverty, hunger and malnutrition, non-hunger factors are also helping the malnutrition level to be double of poverty level. These other factors are namely gender discrimination and poor access to health-care.
Change in context because of influence of market, state and semi-urban culture has led to change in dietary pattern - prevalence of rice and wheat - and has rendered traditional knowledge of feeding practices ineffective.
Poverty creates malnutrition by insanitary conditions and therefore recurrent illness. Poverty deprives a child of his/her mother's time to play and feed him/her. Without such warmth of parental care, child's physical, emotional and intellectual growth lags.
In Chhattisgarh, more than half of children (60%) are malnourished. In India, this number varies from 46% to 70%. This tells us that despite 100 million population of India, we cannot expect to see a similar large number of engineers, doctors, scientists or sportpersons helping to build and elevate status of India in coming decades.
(source: http://www.epw.org.in/uploads/articles/5271.pdf author: T Sundarraman)
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