India remains a country of hungry children, reveals a new report by the international NGO Save the Children. That the scale of hunger among the young ones in India is on a par with Nigeria takes the sheen off the country’s claims of being a economic superpower.

“About a quarter of parents in Nigeria (27 percent) and in India (24 percent) report that their children go without food for an entire day,” the report reads.
Placing the blame squarely on the steady climb of food prices, the report titled ‘A life free from hunger: tackling child malnutrition’ says that inflation abetted dropping out of school.

“Nearly 66 percent respondents in India said rising food prices have been a pressing concern in 2011, while nearly 17 percent parents said their children skipped school to go to work and pay for food,” it said.

The authors of the report noted that both India and Nigeria are emerging economies, but are yet to deliver the benefits of growth to their peoples. Both countries are home to a large number of children whose growth has been stunted by malnutrition and hunger.

“More than a quarter of people in India (27 percent) report that they can never afford to buy staple foods such as meat, milk, or vegetables for their families every week,” the report added.

The price of food has soared across the world due to extreme weather conditions, diversion of farmland for food crops to cash crops, speculative trading of food commodities and the global financial crisis.

The report blamed the lack of strong political will for India’s plight. “India has various social protection programmes in place, they are not focused on improving nutrition for infants and children and are not reaching a number of the most excluded and marginalised communities,” the 24-page report read.

The report is based on studies done in five countries — India, Nigeria, Bangladesh, Peru and Pakistan — where 1,000 rural and urban pockets were sampled. Half the world's malnourished children live in these five nations.

The report said that despite the advances made, almost half a billion children are at risk of permanent damage over the next 15 years because they do not have enough to eat and that 300 children die every hour of every day because of chronic malnutrition. That equals some 2 million deaths a year.

The report described malnutrition as silent killer because it is often not recorded as a cause of death in certificates.

"The world has made dramatic progress in reducing child deaths, down from 12 to 7.6 million, but this momentum will stall if we fail to tackle malnutrition," said Justin Forsyth, chief executive of Save the Children.

Read the report