It’s not easy to be born in the world’s largest democracy.
At any point of time, more than HALF of adolescents, mostly girls, in the country suffer from anaemia, the highest in the world, even worse than war-ravaged Afghanistan. These girls grow up to be undernourished, under weight, sickly mothers who are again plagued by the ‘tired blood’ syndrome, a disorder characterised by the shortage of healthy red blood cells to carry oxygen in the body.
Anaemia is the top cause of maternal mortality in India. In case you need a reminder, our childbirth death statistics are so bleak that they put China, Nigeria and Pakistan to shame.
Clearly, as far as tackling anaemia goes, nothing has worked – not the government programmes, not WHO or UNICEF initiatives nor the shot of glamour brought by UN Goodwill Ambassador Priyanka Chopra.
Anaemia Is the Top Cause of Disability in India and It All Starts at Birth
How’s this for shame: According to the UN data, a child born in India, is far more likely to be malnourished than one from the Democratic Republic of Congo, Zimbabwe or Somalia, the world’s poorest countries.
An extensive National Family Health Survey covering 13 states and two union territories found a staggering increase in anaemia across all ages even though other nutrition parameters seemed to have improved from the last decade.
For far too long anaemia has been considered a casual bystander. Shockingly, nearly HALF of infants and children up to the age of five years were found to be anaemic in India. Anaemia leads to chronic fatigue, weakness and ups the chances of catching other serious diseases.
Anaemia, or iron deficiency caused when the levels of iron in the blood become too low is not just a poverty curse.
In India, the rich are anaemic too – The National Family Health Survey-4, the bible of the public policy aficionados, found that more than 54 percent Indian women are anaemic and nearly 45 percent women in the wealthiest bracket, that’s the top 20 percent households are anaemic too.
If these sick girls are married off young without ever overcoming iron deficiency, one in five of these poorly fed girls, often at the bottom of domestic hierarchy, develop severe anaemia during pregnancy when the blood starts to thin. It puts them at a higher risk of dying from haemorrhage during the delivery.
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So What Should Be Done?
The First 1000 Days
There is a mountain of evidence which suggests that if government intervention programmes target the nutritional needs in the first three years of life, malnutrition and other deficiencies like anaemia, can be tackled.
Beyond the obvious strides in infant health, there is a solid economic reason for the government to be interested in early nutrition.
A recent World Bank study showed that for every dollar spent by India in improving nutrition in the first 1000 days (roughly three years) of a child’s life, a return of USD 45 is to be made with increased productivity of the family and lesser hospital trips. Just extrapolate that figure on a national scale, that will be hundreds of millions of dollars saved which can then be invested in children’s education, maybe?
Take Inspiration From the Cambodia Model
A brilliant low-tech solution in the shape of an iron fish has addressed this problem and halved the cases of iron deficiency in Cambodia.
On a field trip to Cambodia, a Canadian scientist came up with the simple yet wacky solution of placing a lump of iron into the aluminium pot which is traditionally used for cooking. This releases sufficient iron to provide up to 75 percent of people’s daily intake. He shaped it like a fish, a local symbol of good luck for greater acceptability.
So poor people don’t have to OD on expensive spinach for iron needs, they just place the iron fish while cooking and add a dash of lemon (helps in iron absorption) and viola! Anaemia rates halved in Cambodia in just one year of regular use.
Fortify Crops On War Footing
The 2001 Indian Science Congress in the National Capital urged the Indian government with the novel idea that fortifying soil and grains with iron would be a cost-effective way to tackle anaemia.
A decade later, Indian leaders turned to the Washington-based NGO Harvest Plus for their technology of using fortified food crops and carried out pilot projects on millet in the deepest pockets of rural Maharashtra.
In just six-months of eating, iron laden millet reversed anaemia in school children.
Even after two-decades of alarming anaemia levels, the fact that the project is yet to be launched on a national scale speaks tremendously about our political will towards a silent health epidemic.
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