As many as 3,000 children die every day in India as a result of malnutrition, says a report in British daily ‘The Times’ citing a study backed by the British Government.
The study says India is condemning another generation to brain damage, poor education and early death by failing to meet its targets for tackling the malnutrition that affects almost half of its children.
The country is an "economic powerhouse but a nutritional weakling," said the report by the British-based Institute of Development Studies (IDS), which incorporated papers by more than 20 India analysts.
It said that despite India’s recent economic boom, at least 46 per cent of children up to the age of three still suffer from malnutrition, making the country home to a third of the worlds malnourished children.
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 highlights present Indian Government failure to improve basic living standards for most Indians despite presiding over an unprecedented period of economic growth since coming to power in 2004.
The report said one of the main problems was that millions of Indians were unable to hold government officials to account for delivering government feeding programmes, with bureaucrats frequently excluding large groups of individuals including lower castes and women from government initiatives.
Another problem not mentioned in the report is that India opposes the import of high-energy food supplements. The report was part-funded by Britain's Department for International Development (DfID), which will spend 500 million pounds sterling on health and nutrition in India between 2008 and 2012.